Payday loan update (2013): what it changed and what it means now

What Google changed#

Google did not blog about this update. Matt Cutts, then head of Google’s webspam team, confirmed it on X on 11 June 2013: “We just started a new ranking update today for some spammy queries.” He had previewed it in an earlier video.

Search Engine Land reported that the target was heavily spammed queries such as [payday loan] and some pornographic searches. Speaking at SMX Advanced, Cutts explained that it went after unique link schemes, many of them illegal, and that it was rolling out globally, not only in the US.

When it rolled out#

Cutts said the update started on 11 June 2013. Google stated no completion date. Search Engine Land linked and quoted the post in its launch-day story.

Google never named it. Cutts called it a ranking update “for some spammy queries.” Search Engine Land’s launch-day headline called it the Payday Loan Algorithm, and the name the SEO industry adopted stuck.

What is known about its impact#

The figures came from Google, through Cutts at SMX Advanced as reported by Search Engine Land: the update affected roughly 0.3% of US queries, and as much as 4% of Turkish queries, where webspam is typically higher. Google gave no figures on how many sites lost rankings.

What site owners should do#

No payday loan system appears in Google’s current documentation. Its ranking systems guide says spam detection systems, including SpamBrain, deal with content and behaviors that violate its spam policies. If you work in a competitive, heavily spammed niche:

• Do not buy links or use link schemes; they are link spam under Google’s policies.
• Avoid scaled content abuse: many pages made to manipulate rankings rather than help users.
• Compete on real service and useful information rather than on volume of pages or links.

How to check whether it affected you#

This is historical: Search Console keeps 16 months of data, so it cannot show June 2013. If you kept analytics from then, compare organic Google traffic for a week before 11 June 2013 with a week in late June. The Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists the other updates of 2013, so you can rule them out first.

Later refreshes#

• Payday Loan 2.0 (confirmed 20 May 2014): Google said it began rolling out “over the weekend” and noticeably affected about 0.2% of English queries.
• Payday Loan 3.0 (12 June 2014): Matt Cutts said 2.0 targeted spammy sites, while 3.0 targeted spammy queries.

Related updates#

• The exact match domain update was the spam-focused change before it.
• Hummingbird was the next confirmed change, later in 2013.
• Penguin 4.0 was the next major link spam change, in 2016.