Google Discusses the Panda Update

Do you think you have been affected by the Panda update?  Google has been answering questions over on the Google Webmaster Central help forum

'Panda' monium

Wired.com have published a question and answer session with Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts about the new Google algorithm changes.  Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land had named the update 'Farmer' as its main purpose is to target content farms but Amit Singhal explained that Google have named it internally after one of their engineers, his name is Panda.

Cutts and Singhal explain how after the Caffeine update, the Google index grew quickly, and pages have been crawled at a much faster speed. This led to the addition of a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good.

"The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow."

The spam teams and the engineers have come together to produce the new Panda algorithm and Cutts and Singhal are pleased with the results.  When they compared the data from their new algorithm to the user data from the Chrome Site Blocker they found an 84% overlap which showed they were on the right track of providing users with better quality search results.

New Google algorithm combats content farmers

In an effort to combat the effect of 'content farms,' Google have announced the roll out of a new algorithmic change in the USA which has affected the rankings of 11.8% of sites.

Sistrix has been monitoring the effect of the update, known as "Farmer," on a dataset of one million keywords. Their list of the top 25 'losers' includes a number of popular article submission websites including wiseGEEK and eZineArticles.

UK website owners are expecting to see the effects of Farmer over the coming weeks. On the Official Google Blog, Amit Singhal states.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.