How Google Panda Update Went Wrong – Few Proofs

  How Google Panda Update Went Wrong – Few Proofs

 The Google Farmer / Panda Update was announced on February 23th which affected the Google US Data-centers and all the Google US based results. It was covered well here – Danny Sullivan’s take,Aaron Wall’s assessment, SearchMetrics’ analysis, Sistrix’s data-driven post and Seomoz with most of these referring that the Content Scraper Sites were hit though eHow actually gained from this.

The next global update was around 14th April 2011 when Google announced that this could affect many more websites and this was mainly targeted towards Low Quality Content websites, sites which were automatically republishing others content etc, though not listing the exact update information. 

Source :Google Webmaster Central Blog

The update was incorporating user feedback which included many more signals in order to rank higher quality content websites on the top and making the low quality content sites to move down on the SERPS. Even though this affected only 2% of the U.S. queries but overall the webmasters experienced a loss of traffic in the range of 40-60% after the fall in rankings. Here is a small traffic fall for one major blog after the Global Farmer / Panda Update.

 

The following is a example of how the Post-Panda SERPS where in the original articles are not even ranking in the top for the complete post title. In this case the title is Google Panda Update – Top Traffic Losers & Winners List which is just a very simple example. The blog is 3 years old, where never any copied content was published but still it got into the Panda Algorithm mess and lost major rankings.

Another post at seomoz suggests that at several instances the Original Content is being outranked by Content Scrapers and Partners and still not being fixed.

How To Remove Your Name and Profile Picture from Facebook’s Social Ads Original Source is #9 on Google.

The best part of all these issues is that there is no way you could report directly to Google other than submitting a reconsideration request which would report back saying that there was no issue found and also a thread at Google Webmasters Central asking you to post your problem, If you Think you’re affected by the recent algorithm change. The thread has over 2000 posts and there is a very slight chance that Google would actually look into this and get back to the site owners who are reporting their problems.

Another Search Update which hits Original Content based sites and gives more power to the Scrapers. Do report using the following comments section if you find your content is outranked by other sites.