Months ago there were stories of a Panda roaming around the internet slapping and slamming websites that a lot of webmasters cried foul. I didn’t bother to check it as I was lost in my day job and in some other ventures outside blogging.
Those who are seriously into SEO would know by now what I meant by this Panda. Perhaps they’re already affected and didn’t know what kind of truck had hit them. Or maybe they are now aware that all their SEO works in the past might possibly go down the drain.
So in the controversially reliable Wikipedia I got info about this Panda:
“Google Panda is a change to the Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social Networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising. This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results. Soon after the Panda rollout, many websites, including Google's webmaster forum, became filled with complaints of scrapers/copyright infringers getting better rankings than sites with original content.”
Are you affected by this? Me, I’m not sure. I still get the same so-so traffic. My SEO skill is too basic and kinda old school. This site is used to be at PR4, and now it’s PR2. I don’t think Panda hit the PageRanks as well.
Perhaps we can now say that the field is leveled with this change by the big G. This initial hiccup, wherein they say that legit sites got struck while some scrapers got lucky, will surely come to pass. It’s reassuring to know that we’ll be getting less and less of the garbage when we do our web searches. It's also bad news for those making money online out of these search engine pollutants.
