Published
March 8th, 2011 by
Roslyn Garavaglia Google on Low Quality Sites
Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.
Google has made a significant algorithm update, called “Panda”, in response to users crying out about duplicate content and junk we’ve all had to sift through since the Google Caffeine update last year.
Panda filters out shallow-quality content websites in an effort to eradicate content farms, spam and scraper sites. I.e. websites which are low value for users, sites that have copied content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.
“With the removal of these, sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports and thoughtful analysis will see higher rankings in search results”.
Google updates and tweaks occur regularly and generally go unnoticed but this one was fore-warned. After any large update, website traffic can undergo a pretty serious upheaval and not only affect offending websites but also innocent sites with 100% unique content. I believe that if you think you’ve been unfairly slapped out of rankings there is an avenue where you can complain to Google. Research that…..
So far, the update has only been rolled out in the US so we’re yet to see how it will affect site rankings in Australia.
Press release distribution services like EzineArticles, PRNewswire and well known sites like Suite101, HubPages, Mahalo, and Technorati have been hit. Other associated sites which come under the “content farm” label have curiously been unaffected e.g. eHow wasn’t slammed, quite the reverse happened when rankings improved.
Google says, “This update improves overall search quality. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content”. This is great news! I for one, really really hate being taken to the same aricle or information over and over again.
“Newly re-designed document-level classifier will better detect repeated spammy words, such as those found in “junky” automated, self-promoting blog comments.
If you’re using self-service linking services or content farms your website may be at risk of being devalued by Google. Make sure when you’re building content for your website, blog and news articles is, useful, original and your own, it’s always what Google has ever wanted.
You can read further about the Panda Update HERE
Tags: article aggregators, content farms, google ranking update, panda update
