Google's recent algorithm update, nicknamed "Mayday" by webmasters got a lot of people riled up, as many claimed it seriously affected their rankings, and potentially their revenues.

WebProNews spoke with Google's Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced, and he talked a little bit about Mayday, saying that it was designed to try and spot signals of quality on pages and sites that would be good for users.

He noted that the update was not part of his Webspam team's efforts, but was part of general search quality, and that human intervention is not involved. It's strictly algorithmic.

More WebProNews Videos

Cutts says auto-generated pages and content farms tend to get hit the most by Mayday. His advice to webmasters affected by it, is basically to improve quality. He says to make sure you're returning the highest quality content for users. Stuff that's not available anywhere else can be helpful - stuff that's not duplicate or scraped or lower quality.

Based on the reactions we've seen from disgruntled webmasters, I'm guessing that advice isn't going to satisfy everyone, but I don't imagine taking the advice can hurt either way. The worst thing that happens is that the user benefits from better content.

More on Mayday (including comments from affected webmasters) here.