Google Panda Update Episode 1: The Phantom Panda

As Google continues to revolutionize and improve the quality of its search result, new algorithm shake up has taken place to address the duplicate,content farm, low quality and spammy search result in order to filter out and reduce the rankings of low quality sites which are less helpful for users. Matt Cutts announced on his blog way back in January about the launched of the algorithm change in order to decrease or irradicate "content farms" and "spammy or low-quality content" in Googles search result. The answer is their major algorithmic update known as the "Google Panda Update".

What is Google Panda Update?

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on." - Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam.

At first it was known as the Google Farmer Update as labeled by media which started to roll out in February 2011 and made major significant changes in Googles algorithm. The big algorithmic update immediately impacts almost 12% Of US results, noted to be one of the most noticeable algorithm changes of Google that attacked on the relevancy of their results.

Article directories definitely took a major hit and most of their site pages dropped their keyword rankings and traffic. This only shows how Google influence and takes control over the web that in a single algorithm update, search result will be different. Though Google didn't officially said that they are going after content farms, both “scraper” sites (those sites who are pulling contents from other sources or those sites that don't have original content) and “content farms" (those sites that has pure web-spam content or sites with shallow and low-quality content) are the affected and badly hit of this Google Panda Update.

For me I'm impressed by the big leap made by Google in order to improve their search result and ranking. This algorithm update will reduce the low quality and spammy sites from appearing in Google's search result and make the web ecosystem friendly which will take search quality in a higher level.