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The Impact of Google’s Panda 2

As everyone who’s been paying attention to the world of SEO knows, one of Google’s most violent creations to-date is known as “Panda.” Panda, the content update designed to push high-quality sites up and demolish low-quality “content farms,” has had more than its share of complaints. These have run the gamut from, “Why me? Oh, Google, why me?” to “Really? You didn’t penalize eHow?” But now with version two of Panda released globally, and user metrics being taken into account, the SEO deck is being shuffled once again. So, what’s changed?

This is primarily a “let’s penalize more people” update. Search Metrics conducted a study that examined the change in traffic for sites in the UK. Among sites that saw a substantial drop were eHow (the infamous “how to” site), Hub Pages, Review Centre, and Bing’s Ciao. This means that a lot more mills are being hurt, but are the small sites being helped?

A lot of the sites that benefit won’t benefit directly. Rather, they’ll shift up in the rankings as articles, reviews, and guides from content mills are dropped into the latter pages. But a few types of sites are seemingly benefitting; news sites, for example, seem to be getting a lift on the SERP.

All in all, the second Panda is pretty much like the first, but with a few additional sites being thrown to the wolves, and the total impact being broader (since this algorithm change is impacting all regional versions of Google). As with the initialrelase of Panda, advice for struggling webmasters is simple: 1) Make sure you have quality content, 2) Move any bunk content off-site, 3) Address any pages that have low visitor performance (e.g., time on site, bounce rate), and 4) Hope for mercy in Google’s future tweaks.

[via Search Metrics]

Category SEO
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Rob D Young

Rob has been insatiably obsessed with Google, search engine technology, and the trends of the web-based world since he began ...

The Impact of Google’s Panda 2

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