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As I broke last night, Google has released an update to the Payday Loan Algorithm also known as the Google Spam Algorithm over the weekend.
No, I was not crazy expecting something big that happened over the weekend and throughout the month and this week. In fact, Google also started rolling out Panda 4.0 yesterday, which I will talk about a bit later.
The Spam Algorithm specifically targets spammy queries such as payday loan, viagra, and the related types of queries that spammers target heavily.
Matt Cutts described the algorithm before they launched it initially a year ago in this video:
This update impacted English queries by about 0.2% to a noticeable degree, Google's Matt Cutts told me.
The previous one impacted impacted English queries by 0.3% but was much more noticeable outside of the English language.
There is no doubt that black hats took notice, a BlackHatWorld thread has a bunch of them talking about how "Google is getting better" and they noticed drops in their rankings.
Anyway, even though Google said nothing is going on, we've been seeing signs of major changes and ranking shifts all throughout the month. I suspect those were tests for both this Google Spam Algorithm version 2.0 and the Panda 4.0 release.
This past weekend we started rolling out a ranking update for very spammy queries: http://t.co/NpUZRqpnBI
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 21, 2014Forum discussion at Twitter, BlackHatWorld and Google+.
