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.
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.
About Sean
I’ve done some general analysis of how it appears that Google’s pander update works (I must stress I don’t *know* I’ve just looked into state of the art anti-copying algorithms and Google’s own research).
My finding can be found at http://scott-herbert.com/blog/2011/04/14/how-panderfarmer-may-be-finding-spun-and-plagiarised-content/
From what I can tell the Cult of Mac lost its ranking because most of its articles are short and have a large number of quotes in them (relative to the amount of text). This would push the percentage of matching n-grams in each article up and make it look like spam.
Since the Cult of Mac is back up. Google is either not counting n-grams in quotes or they have pushed up the percentage of matches they allow.
If any of your readers are having similar issues I’d recommend they put any quotes in quote marks and cite it and keep them as short as possible also ensure there’s enough original text around the quote to lower the frequency on n-grams.
For a while back, I wrote of how to have the best high volume links. Fast forward eight months and Google has made two major changes to its algorithm — first to target spammy/scraper sites, followed by the larger Panda update that targeted “low quality” sites. Plus, Google penalized JCPenney, Forbes, and Overstock.com for “shady” linking practices..