A month after the second version rolled out, Google launched Payday Loan 3.0 in June 2014 which is another significant iteration of the algorithm. It still targeted spam-heavy websites and queries, particularly low-quality links. The filter was named as such since most spammy searches and sites were from the loans industry. Other affected types of businesses were pharmaceuticals, casinos, and pornographic domains.
Google continues to introduce new signals for the algorithm to detect web spam. With Payday Loan 3.0, the search engine cracked down on low-quality links such as paid backlinks from forums, blogs, and websites.
One similarity that the Payday Loan filter has from Penguin is that they both scan a site’s backlink profile and evaluate the sources of its links. It’s just that the former focuses on spammy domains and queries especially for keywords involving loans, casinos, and even Viagra.
The filter got its name from payday loans searches in the UK where the search engine displayed shady sites and led to a compromise in user data. It cleaned up the SERPs when the algorithm first rolled out.
After Payday Loan 3.0 was launched, the SERPs were more or less showing legitimate companies which were authoritative and relevant answers to users’ queries. Depending on the severity of their violation, the websites that got hit by the update were devalued and dropped several pages below or even entirely delisted altogether. Domains such as Tide U Over and Red Wallet, which previously held the top spots in the results pages, ceased to dominate after the new signals were implemented.
The update also brought about better defenses against negative SEO attacks, which are the black hat practices of damaging a website by infecting it with malicious backlinks and aggressive spamming. Some disgruntled competitor could be desperate enough to play dirty and unleash hundreds of spammy links to your site, destroy your reputation with fake Yelp reviews, or hack your domain.
To protect your website against malicious SEO attacks, here are a couple of things you can do: