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Posted by Abdul on May 22, 2011

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.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Internet, The Net - Comments: 8 Comments to Read


  • Henry Martin said,

    Thanks Google for this. Now we can be more sure of getting good quality results, instead of loads of ads and products to buy.
    —Henry

    [Reply To This Comment]

  • Jagan Mangat said,

    Nicely written Abdul,yea those websites do have low quality content and were ranking Good in Google SERPs,but not now i think(u said so).
    I wanna point out one thing and that is,you can’t blame Adsense,go again to their article pages,yea they have too many ads in between articles but every ad unit starts with “Ads by Google” first and then the ads starts….they are not confusing…..a reader is made known on what link he is clicking.More over they are Premium Publishers and for Premium Publishers ad units like those ones are allowed.
    Have a nice time…..Abdul! :wink:

    [Reply To This Comment]

  • Alexia said,

    That has to be the best thing google did in the last couple of years. Not that I go against guys that have worked hard to build up their content farms using the opportunity google itself created. But this opens new doors for genuine real content producers that may now breath some fresh air. Guys, to your pens. !

    [Reply To This Comment]

  • Alexia said,

    and do not blame google for repairing its own earlier mistake. :)

    [Reply To This Comment]

  • Alexis said,

    It’s been one of the best thing Google has never done online. Internet is a better place now.Good content is king

    [Reply To This Comment]

  • Ali said,

    @Alexis – why do you think its one of the best things? Its probably the worst update since I have been online.

    Ezine at least had content – I am getting PARKED DOMAINS on first pages of Google, for very competitive terms!

    So yeah, content is King… more like parked domains are king…

    [Reply To This Comment]

  • werner said,

    This is a positive update. It ephasizes that you have to provide value to users on your websites. Not just publish content for the sake of publishing something of little value.

    [Reply To This Comment]

  • James from Real Writing Jobs Scam said,

    Great post with nice inside view of Panda update. Really true that the big ‘G’ has really done well in providing more value to their user.

    [Reply To This Comment]

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