Google Panda Adds Many Sites to the Endangered Species List...

Anyone who pays any attention to the web has to pay attention to Google. And that means paying attention to Google updates.

Usually these are little tweaks in the background that no-one gets too fussed about. Occasionally larger ones come along, but in the end they are forgotten about.

Yesterday Google rolled out the latest change to the English speaking world (the USA had already been done to some extent) with its Panda update.

This is a massive update because it has affected a large percentage of search results, said to be around the 12% mark, and because it has impacted a perhaps unprecendented number of pages as the target has been in many cases the largest sites of all: article directories and many sites that have a large community element to them and therefore have what is algorithmically determined to be 'lower quality content'.

Reading the feedback on forums it is quite apparent that whilst some genuine offenders have been taken out, many legitimate sites that have fair to good quality content have been caught in the crossfire. You might wonder why this is? Well, it's because as intelligent as Googlebot may be, computers still blindly apply a list of rules. In the jargon the algorithm looks at some statistics to do with a page rather than being able to access the semantic value of a page. It's about syntactical intepretation not semantics, and so things can go horribly wrong.

Because, genuinely for the first time, so many big players have had their traffic destroyed by up to 90% or so, and not uncommonly 50%+, the impact of all this will be interesting. When many of these article directories, shopping sites, product recommendation sites and so on are handing a large percentage of their staff the final pay cheque, will they have the appetite to publicly criticise the big 'G' or will they take their punishment and run off to optimising for Bing and Yahoo and focus on those search engines instead?

It all remains to be seen, but this could be the most significant update ever because many powerful and large sites with many staff have been affected so strongly so quickly, and they won't be very happy about it. The list of complainants to the European Commission enquiry on the Google anti-monopoly probe may be just about to get a whole lot louder. We'll all have to watch this space to see if that happens or not, but it's certainly interesting times for those who follow the search engines.

Has anyone here been affected by the changes either positively or negatively, or even seen changes (good or bad) in the quality of sites being returned for their searches? It would be good to have a decent debate on here as it's been really quiet recently!

Re : Google Panda Adds Many Sites to the Endangered Species List

Tim

I wasn't aware of that I have to say - but I don't keep up to speed with the ins and outs of the search engines.

It sounds like a lot of people have got a very rude awakening by the sounds of it though. Do you think google will stick to their line or renege a little bit if the reaction is strong enough?

Re : Google Panda Adds Many Sites to the Endangered Species List

If those sites have lost all that traffic from Google then that means the relative percentage of traffic they get from other search engines must have shot up just by staying still - is what you say really true? I wouldn't have thought they'd want to give anyone an incentive to start using other search engines and buying SEO services for those... come to think of it is there even such a thing as "SEO" for the likes of Yahoo and Bing and Altavista and whatever other search engines exist?!?!

Re : Google Panda Adds Many Sites to the Endangered Species List

Wow that does sound like a major change!

But if all those websites have their traffic cut and, from what I've seen, most of those large sites contain Google advertising, then won't Google themselves reduce their revenue?

I guess it just goes to show that any website strategy that is so heavily dependent on just one search engine for its success is always inherently risky if it falls out of favour with it for whatever reason. That said when there is no competition I'm not sure what any website could do about it... as Chris suggests, in the UK at least, Search Engine Optimisation I take to mean Google Optimisation.

Re : Google Panda Adds Many Sites to the Endangered Species List

The story about Panda made it on to the BBC news website... I can't remember a google update doing that before so clearly people are starting to take note of the significance of this one!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13091708

So clearly it looks like this could run and run, and since the article mentions the EU competition case the prediction that there could be many more affected and disenchanted site owners jumping on board could mean that the case does not actually turn out to be the formality that many at first anticipated it would be.

Re : Google Panda Adds Many Sites to the Endangered Species List

Google panda is a good thing as it remove the spamming sites from the web..!