If you compete in one of the highly competitive market areas that is targeted by Google’s Payday Loan algorithm, be prepared for the next update this week. Although it has been less than a month since we last saw the Payday Loan Algo get refreshed, Matt Cutts announced at SMX Advanced that we will see the next update as early as today.

The Payday loan algo has always traditionally targeted very competitive markets. While payday loans is one of the industries hit hard, it also affects other highly spammy market areas such as pharmaceuticals, casinos and other financial areas such as mortgages and insurance.

Danny Sullivan asked for specific keywords, to ask about the sites that would be very sad when the algo update goes out.  “Payday loans, casinos, debt consolidation, those sorts of things,” said Matt Cutts in response.

This time they are focusing more on the spammy queries, rather than specifically targeting the ranking sites themselves.  Because Google prefers to see sites penalized through algo changes rather than manual penalties, it will be interesting to watch and see how well it works with a slightly different attack angle.

Also included in this update is better negative SEO protection for negative SEO attacks. Because competitive market areas tend to be more frequently targeted for negative SEO campaigns, Google is working to prevent sites from being penalized unfairly for negative SEO campaigns, such as a competitor buying 10,000 low quality links and pointing them to a site that is ranking better than their own.

This update will also see counterfeit sites hit as well, however Cutts’ stressed it was simply a side effect, and not the intent of the payday loans algo update.