Google Panda Update, Goodbye to Low-Quality Link Building

Google has released a major ranking algorithm update

LONG BEACH, California – Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts commented on Google’s latest ranking algorithm update, named “Panda”. The latest algorithm addresses the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to users. This major change affects almost 12 percent of all search results, and the web is still buzzing about its implications.

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Why Did Google Upgrade the Ranking Algorithm?

After Google’s “Caffeine” indexing algorithm update in 2009, Google received a lot of good fresh content. The “gibberish” spam content that could be found in Google’s results before vanished. Unfortunately, a new kind of low quality shallow content appeared in the results.

Cutts: It was like, “What’s the bare minimum that I can do that’s not spam?” It sort of fell between our respective groups. And then we decided, okay, we’ve got to come together and figure out how to address this.

How Does Google Recognize a “Shallow-Content Site”?

Singhal admitted Google hasn’t solved the problem of recognizing shallow content yet but research is ongoing. Google defined a set of questions to judge the quality of a site, questions such as:

• Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card?
• Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?
• Do you consider this site to be authoritative?
• Would it be okay if this was in a magazine?
• Does this site have excessive ads?”

Using these type of questions, Google programmers had to form a definition of low quality which could be used in an algorithm.

Cutts: ” we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons …

Which Sites Were Hit Most By the Update?

It seems so-called content-farms were hit by the update.

Wired.com: Suite 101 rankings have tanked, and his keyword traffic is down 94 percent. He says that it’s not fair, since he commissions and curates his own articles and contends the quality is high.”

Cutts: I feel pretty confident about the algorithm on Suite 101… In some sense when people come to Google, that’s exactly what they’re asking for — our editorial judgment.

Singhal: … our classifier that we built this time does a very good job of finding low-quality sites. It was more cautious with mixed-quality sites, because caution is important.

Is Google Making Those Algorithms to Help Google Advertisers?

Singhal: I can say categorically that money does not impact our decisions.

Cutts: If someone has a specific question about, for example, why a site dropped, I think it’s fair and justifiable and defensible to tell them why that site dropped. But for example, our most recent algorithm does contain signals that can be gamed. If that one were 100 percent transparent, the bad guys would know how to optimize their way back into the rankings.

Don’t be Removed By Google for Spam

The moral of this story! Google continues to remove spammers from the search results. If you don’t want to risk your website, use search engine optimization methods that are safe to use with Google.

Google Friendly Plugins

This does raise the question as to whether affiliate cloaking methods, especially those used by applications such as Samurai Stealth Cloaker are now contravening the new Google algorithms.

(Update: Samurai Stealth Cloaker is NO LONGER AVAILABLE)