Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, recently announced at SMX Advanced in Seattle that the third iteration of its Payday loan algorithm would be rolling out sometime this week.
Then this evening on Twitter, Matt Cutts confirmed that the update is already in the process of being rolled out:
@BtotheMcG it's rolling out now!
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 12, 2014
To refresh your memory on what the Payday Loan algorithm is (there are a lot of algorithm updates to keep up with!), it is an update is intended to specifically target ‘very spammy queries’, with no relation to either Panda or Penguin.
The ‘very spammy queries’ are those that typically get associated with excessive web spam. Primarily payday loans, insurance, accident claims and other similar sites.
Google’s intention to prevent these kinds of sites from surfacing in its search results.
Version 2.0 of the Payday Loan algorithm was rollout out internationally less than a month ago, which was said to affect 0.2% of English queries.
There is no word yet on what percent of queries will be affected with version 3.0, this is all the information we have at this time. Although I would wager that, unless you’re running a site in a niche that Google would consider to be ‘very spammy’, there is very little for you to be personally worried about with this update.
