What to do if the Panda update affected your site
As you well know, Google has recently implemented the Panda ‘farmer’ update in their search algorithm. There have been some serious issues with webmasters who have been ‘unjustly’ affected by this change as they claim that they are not content farmers. What should you do if the update has affected your site as a civilian casualty?
Stray bullets
It happened to Cult of Mac blog. What are the chances that it won’t happen to yours? Just in case, I want to let you know that you can tell Google if you have been unjustly affected by the Panda update. How? You can post in a thread created by Google Webmaster Central wherein you can let Google know that your site was affected by the recent algorithm change.
Webmaster’s Note: This thread has long since been removed by Google. I suggest you check out my post on how to recover from Google’s broad core updates. I also made a similar post regarding Google’s official announcement on the same topic.
Why did Google allow this thread? Well, take it from Google’s Michael Wyszomierski as he says:
“According to our metrics, this update improves overall search quality.
However, we are interested in hearing feedback from site owners and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms. If you know of a high quality site that has been negatively affected by this change, please bring it to our attention in this thread. Note that as this is an algorithmic change we are unable to make manual exceptions, but in cases of high quality content we can pass the examples along to the engineers who will look at them as they work on future iterations and improvements to the algorithm. So even if you don’t see us responding, know that we’re doing a lot of listening.”
There’s more to the Google Panda update than meets the eye. Personally, I think that the update is well and good as it challenges websites and blogsites to up the ante a little for their content and business model. It just needs a little tweaking as it is still new and off-the drawing board.
