The time was Oct. 2010. If you googled specific information for "Sinkerator garbage disposal leaking troubleshooting", "Christmas gift ideas for 6 year old niece", or "Lifestyle treadmill T3 heart rate strip", the search engine would likely lead you to one of many pages from ehow, ezinearticles, examiner.com, or other large content sites. And you were disappointed of course. The reason was simple; those articles were not created by experts, rather they were written by many stay-home moms who know little about the subjects and just wanted some extra income from ads. Those pages were ranked high because they met many conditions of “quality pages:” 1) page from an authority site, 2) content is relevant, and 3) well-linked. Google wanted to remove these poor and low-quality sites, which included: spam sites, sites with copied content, sites that are considered not useful, sites that aren’t properly moderated or controlled, and most importantly shallow content sites. Google Panda update has weeded out many shallow content pages from content farm sites, and pages from content farmers were lowered to page 2 or page 3 of SERP for many long tail searches. Although a small percentage of high-quality sites were impacted by the update, it simply means that the pages or sites possess certain characteristics of content farms and do not meet the criteria set forth by Google’s heightened algorithm.
What perplexed webmasters and business owners is that many quality sites having nothing to do with a content farm were struck by the Panda update too. With the long overdue Google Panda Update many SEO professionals are wondering what this update is and how it can influence a website’s ranking, traffic, revenue, or long term marketing strategy. The update has SEO professionals thinking about what they can do to ensure a website isn’t Pandamized. The Google Panda (or Farmer) Update is a major revision on how Google ranks pages and sites. Google has made substantial enhancements to their algorithm with this update so that it can measure content value of websites and web pages by analyzing site structures and vocabulary distributions.
The first Panda update on February 24, 2011 targeted the shallow and reproduced content. Shallow content is considered to be too small in size and too generalized for such detailed concepts. The Panda Update, according to Google, impacted 11.8% of U.S. search result. It also reportedly caused an 80% loss in organic traffic for some content sites. Panda 2.0 update occurred in April 2011 where it went global and Google began to incorporate user feedback to help find better search results. This was when Google began to integrate data about the sites that users blocked into their algorithm. Google stated that the signals from Panda 2.0 had affected only about 2% of U.S. search results, far less than the initial 11.8% from Panda 1.0. Currently at Panda 2.1, the effect doesn’t seem significant, although it is still too new and too early to estimate that impact. Even though Google is known to change their algorithms constantly, could a Panda 3.0 surface?
Many webmasters think that Google wanted to target and eliminate content farms; clearly this is not the case since these sites continue to have traffic. A content farm site is a site with large number of semantically similar pages of shallow content. They are sites that produce a stream of articles or posts that are used simply to put more substance on a webpage. For most long tail searches, pages from content farms were ranked higher before the update occurred. E-Commerce sites were hit as well due to the large number of products and services they offer and the high possibility of duplicate descriptions of those products and services. Google also targeted scraper sites, which are sites that do not have their own original content, but rather pull content from other sources. The content from some e-commerce sites are comparable to scraper sites as they get the descriptions for their products or services from a particular e-vendor, who then gives that same description to another e-commerce site. The update has clearly affected and impacted both content sites and e-commerce sites.
What was the planned outcome from the Google Panda Update? Simply better ranking for higher quality sites. High-quality sites contain unique, richer content that are based on in-depth information and research. In our experience, webpages and websites that are more strongly edited for any type of errors are ranked higher in the update versions of Google’s Panda. This update did improve results on search engines queries that were previously dominated by pages from content farms. The search results now consist of more diverse and different types of sites instead of so many results from content farms. Although there is speculation if there will be a Panda 3.0, there is no need to get worked up over it just yet. Just let Panda do its work for now. Google is known to make one major update each year; this year’s was the Panda Update.
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