Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google has “started” a new ranking update to help clean up some spammy queries. It’s one of the changes that Cutts warned us about in that big video a while back.

In the video, Cutts talked about working harder on types of queries that tend to draw a lot of spam.

“We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google, so, for example, there were some people complaining about searches like ‘payday loans’ on Google.co.uk,” he said. “So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more clean to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact on those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”

Cutts discussed the update a little at SMX Advanced. Barry Schwartz from the conference’s sister site, Search Engine Land, reports:

Matt Cutts explained this goes after unique link schemes, many of which are illegal. He also added this is a world-wide update and is not just being rolled out in the U.S. but being rolled out globally.

This update impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries were web spam is typically higher.

They’re calling it the “payday loan algorithm,” by the way (not sure if that’s official).

In another tweet, Cutts said that the update will be rolling out over the course of the next one to two months.

Image: Hersheys.com