Google have brought in an aggressive algorithm change to target the menace created by hacked sites. Hacked sites are basically ones which have their data manipulated through several SEO black at techniques hence resulting in showing up on top of search engine rankings while a lot of genuine sites take a hit in the rankings.
According to an update from Google this algorithm change will approximately have 5% impact on the certain queries. As more updates are rolled out based on this new algorithm user might start finding only relevant results for their search queries because of the impact of the new algorithm update on the hacked sites.
This new algorithm will remove a lot of hacked sites thus freeing up space for genuine sites to start ranking better in the search engine. This will be good news for genuine sites who keep getting pushed down in ranking for no fault of theirs.
A lot of black hat techniques are involved in ranking these hacked sites better. One such technique is the usage of cloaked PDF documents on hacked sites. PDF cloaking came into prominence after Google had gone down heavily on keyword stuffing on websites through meta tags. PDF cloaking is more of a keyword stuffing technique where PDF are stuffed with keywords to help sites start ranking for a particular keyword. PDF cloaking works exactly the same way like keyword stuffing in meta tags, since Google hadn’t made any drastic changes to prevent poisoning of PDF’s through keywords. This type of technique is used in phishing, but they are also find on legitimate sites which are probably compromised and loaded with these PDF which actually act as a back linking source.
The new algorithm update will come as a huge sigh of relief webmasters who struggle to rank legitimate websites.
