The Attack of The Google Panda Update

Before you let the post title mislead you into thinking that Google trained an army of pandas to take over the internet, let me clarify. The

panda

(or farmer) update has been named after some
Google<

>
engineer who wrote this update to bring down the article farms who were providing Adsense loaded articles of low quality. Being kinda slow to do write-ups on Google Algorithm changes, as usual, I must explain how happy I am with this update.

How often have you googled something important and were eventually led to an article fully loaded with ads? And after finding a way to read through the ads, you discover that the article was not helpful at all. Google has finally brought these websites down for good. I’m not particularly talking about made for adsense websites, but I’m talking more along the lines of Ezine Articles or WiseGeek.

I’ll start by explaining my frustration with wisegeek.com. Wise geek is an informational website that contains over 50,000 articles. Apart from the traditional “how to” articles, this website targets “What is..” articles. So if you were ever searching for something like “What is a credit card?”, this website would come first.

Google Panda Update

Since the website was old, had hundreds and thousands of indexed pages, and a lot of editorial backlinks, this website had a lot of authority in the eyes of Google. The authority was so much, that the website would dominate a spot in the google top 3 rankings for almost any keyword it would target in it`s articles.

The typical article is a near 500 word, half helpful article. Along with the articles are huge Adsense blocks carefully embedded to fool the visitor for normal links. I’m a webmaster who plays with ads all the time, and I found that to be irritating. I can only imagine what the rest of the people would’ve thought about it.

Well, long story short, Google punished WiseGeek.com and other websites of the sort who were either loaded with ads or had low quality articles on them. This update was much needed and finally Google SERPs have gotten rid of big websites that added little value and were getting a lot of traffic for no reason. Webpronews published a whole list of the the winners and losers in the panda update.

To my knowledge there isn’t really any small website that has been affected by this update in terms of more search traffic or less search traffic. At least, the search traffic at my websites has remained constant and I’m glad google took this initiative to punish the big ones. To be honest, these website had it coming.

Let me know if you know of any smaller websites that have been affected by this update and why. If you’re not sure whether your website has been affected or not, then just compare your search traffic of march with February. If you see a different trend than the previous month then there is a chance that your website has been affected as well.

Posted in: The Attack of The Google Panda Update