By Matthew Barker

Given the massive importance of search & online marketing to business and the entire economy, it’s strange that changes and developments in the world’s biggest search engines don’t break out of industry news websites and into the mainstream press more often.

But Google’s Panda Updates (more info on what these were and how they affect Travel here) were of sufficient importance and caused enough ripples in the “real” world that even non-SEO types have started to take notice. In particular, a team of computer scientists at the University of Glasgow who have just published research on the outcomes of Google’s war on low quality websites, which was covered in this article in the New Scientist.

The research demonstrated that Google has been largely successful in its aggressive push against derivative, uninformative and thin content (typically found on the web’s infamous “Content Farms”). In one example given, the researchers tested results for the phrase “How to train for a Marathon” before and after Google’s updates. Where the results were previously stuffed with low grade, barely useful tips such as “buy a good pair of running shoes”, the  new results were dominated by high quality, well researched content provided by authoritative sources such as Runner’s World magazine.

So there we have it: the academic research has proven what we already knew: Successful websites must invest in high quality, authoritative and creative content.