Google Unleashes the Panda
The big news in the search engine world these days is the search algorithm change implemented by Google over the last 3 months, a project that Google code named Panda. If you are not a part of the Internet business world or the geeky web development community, you probably didn't notice it. Google regularly changes its algorithms to improve search results. But if I may use VP Joe Biden's tactful comments to describe this particular change: "It is a big F***ing deal".
Search engine ranking of some big name websites have gone down ( and have gone up for some other websites ). As a result search engine traffic and the associated revenues of those websites have plummeted. People are panicking and I've met some of them.
How did it all start? Apparently J.C Penney spoiled the party for everybody. At least that is how it began, before other people were dragged through the mud by the big daddy of search. According to a NY Times story published in Feb 2011, J.C Penney used dubious search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to game the Google search rankings. Basically, the SEO company hired by J.C Penny published thousands of non-contextual links to J.C Penney's website on websites set up just for the purpose of fooling the search engines. The more inbound links a website has on the Internet, the more important it is considered by the search engines. Due to these changes, J.C Penney ranked very high in Google search results over the holiday season and they made big bucks. But Google got a wind of it and also found many other companies employing such practices (commonly called black hat SEO practices). So Google changed their search algorithm in Feb 2011 to punish such sites. Along with J.C Penney many other sites lost their rankings in the Google search results. Here is a list of major websites that lost their Google rankings: Panda-Losers.
A second wave of Panda was unleashed in April 2011, this time globally.
Biggest Losers slapped around by Panda are the websites termed as "content farms" in SEO/Internet Lingo. According to Wikipedia: "In the context of the World Wide Web, the term content farm is used to describe a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views as first exposed in the context of social spam."
Many well known brands such a eHow.com, Hubpages.com, ezinarticles.com, about.com, associatedcontent.com, encyclopedia.com etc have suffered badly at the hands of Panda. Google on the other hand is saying the end users have been reporting much better search results after the Panda upgrade.
In a nutshell, this has been the big news in the search engine world in the last 2-3 months. So what advice does Google give to improve your search engine rankings after the Panda upgrade ? Well it is basically the same advice it used to give before: "Create a valuable website for the Users (with hi-quality content) and the search engines would show you love too. Follow our quality guidelines and stick to white hat SEO. Also don't try to game us, we can unleash more KungFu Pandas to kick your behind."
Search engine ranking of some big name websites have gone down ( and have gone up for some other websites ). As a result search engine traffic and the associated revenues of those websites have plummeted. People are panicking and I've met some of them.
How did it all start? Apparently J.C Penney spoiled the party for everybody. At least that is how it began, before other people were dragged through the mud by the big daddy of search. According to a NY Times story published in Feb 2011, J.C Penney used dubious search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to game the Google search rankings. Basically, the SEO company hired by J.C Penny published thousands of non-contextual links to J.C Penney's website on websites set up just for the purpose of fooling the search engines. The more inbound links a website has on the Internet, the more important it is considered by the search engines. Due to these changes, J.C Penney ranked very high in Google search results over the holiday season and they made big bucks. But Google got a wind of it and also found many other companies employing such practices (commonly called black hat SEO practices). So Google changed their search algorithm in Feb 2011 to punish such sites. Along with J.C Penney many other sites lost their rankings in the Google search results. Here is a list of major websites that lost their Google rankings: Panda-Losers.
A second wave of Panda was unleashed in April 2011, this time globally.
Biggest Losers slapped around by Panda are the websites termed as "content farms" in SEO/Internet Lingo. According to Wikipedia: "In the context of the World Wide Web, the term content farm is used to describe a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views as first exposed in the context of social spam."
Many well known brands such a eHow.com, Hubpages.com, ezinarticles.com, about.com, associatedcontent.com, encyclopedia.com etc have suffered badly at the hands of Panda. Google on the other hand is saying the end users have been reporting much better search results after the Panda upgrade.
In a nutshell, this has been the big news in the search engine world in the last 2-3 months. So what advice does Google give to improve your search engine rankings after the Panda upgrade ? Well it is basically the same advice it used to give before: "Create a valuable website for the Users (with hi-quality content) and the search engines would show you love too. Follow our quality guidelines and stick to white hat SEO. Also don't try to game us, we can unleash more KungFu Pandas to kick your behind."
posted by Vikas Phonsa at
9:50 PM
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