Matt Cutts, the face of Google’s SEO team, recently put out a shoutcast to address a new spam related algo update (another one?!) which has been nicknamed the Google PayDay loans algorithm update by a lot of search engine marketers.

Google PayDay Loans Algorithm Update

The name comes from the sorts of search queries the update is going to address, queries which have traditionally been thought of as being heavily spammed keywords. You know the type, pornographic search queries, queries related to money, or keywords related to “male enhancement” or “viagra”. Specifically, enough people in the UK contacted Google’s UK branch and complained about the low quality of the results of the pages being displayed for “PayDay loans” which started the ball rolling on the update.

In a way, these niches lend themselves to attracting the kinds of SEOers who are more likely to spam to get ahead than SEOers you’d find in other niches. That’s not to make a blanketed statement or assumption about all SEOers in these niches, but you could make the argument that the only way at the moment you could get ahead in these niches is to join the competition and spam as it’s been working enough for Google to take notice.

Matt Cutts was quoted as saying something to the effect that Google has long ignored the heavily spammed niches. This could be because they don’t consider people who run these queries as important as others or it may have just been too much spam to deal with in the past. In any event, a new algorithm is being rolled out to weed through low quality sites for generally spammy queries, thus making an effort by Google to offer high quality results no matter what your query is.

What does the Google PayDay loans algorithm have to do with you?

The answer is honestly probably not a whole lot unless you’re in one of these niches. If you’re making a ton of money in one of these niches you’re probably not a regular on this blog, however. Furthermore, if you have had success in one of these niches in the past then it’s likely you spammed the heck out of the internet to get there, in which case it may be time that you re-examined your SEO strategy. That’s assuming the update will actually have a concrete effect on spamming SEOers.

How about you? Are you in a traditionally thought of “spammy niche” right now, and if so, have you experienced any positive or negative effects (depending on your SEO strategy) because of the update?