Baidu announced recently that it’s going to release the 3rd version of Hurricane Algorithm in August, which is against websites with not a clear subject.
Baidu’s Hurricane 1.0 (listed in Full List of Baidu’s algorithm updates – till March 2018) in July 2017 and Hurricane 2.0 in September 2018, were released to tackle “illegally copied content” and “Malicious Content Acquisition”.
Similarly, Hurricane 3.0 is claimed to punish websites with “cross-field content collecting” and “website group” problems, and one symptom of such problems is clearly stated to be “lack of focus”.
Two kinds of “unfocused websites” are taken by Baidu as examples:
- Websites have a clear field and industry in meta title, description or body content on their homepage, but release irrelevant or low-relevant posts.
- Websites have no clear fields or industries and publish content of different fields.
Besides, another symptom of “site grouping” – a black-hat SEO tactic for link farms is claimed by Baidu to be using a same template for multiple websites, which have also similar content.
In my opinion, it’s good to detect and punish websites with duplicate content or copied content, but not all “unfocused” websites are cheating sites with such content, especially personal blogs.
For example, Bill Gates’ blog recommends books of various subjects, but his posts are original content instead of copied posts.
And from the perspective of writing, bloggers don’t have to stick to their one certain subject all the time.
So Baidu’s statement about the “symptoms” of questionable websites are confusing. Hope it wouldn’t mistakenly punish good sites with original and useful content.