Webmasters Vocalize about the Google Panda Update
August 2, 2011
The race to the top is tough – especially in the race to Google’s top search rankings. “Google: Ask Yourself These 23 Questions if Panda Impacted Your Website” reports on the woes of some webmasters who’ve lost revenue due to Google’s rollout of the Panda Update, the algorithm change aimed at identifying low-quality pages and sites.
The article reports on Google’s Amit Singhal’s recent blog post outlining 24 questions webmasters should ask themselves about the quality of their own sites. But blog respondents also had something to say:
Singhal also notes that since Panda rolled out, Google has rolled out more than a dozen additional tweaks. But that doesn’t matter to a few people who have already commented on Singhal’s post, noting a very obvious flaw that Google still hasn’t conquered: scrapers are outranking the original content in many cases.
So what’s Google aiming at here? Could they be trying to give their AdWords a boost? AdWords, the main advertising product and source of revenue for the information giant, is the reason you see sponsored links with your Google search. An advertiser pays for trigger words.
When a user searches on Google, ads for the relevant words are shown as the sponsored links. So what does this mean for the little guy with high-quality Web content?
We’ll have to wait and see as Google continues to tweak and webmasters continue to vocalize through blog posts. The question we keep discussing at lunch is, “Are these changes intended to boost ad revenues or help the average Google searcher?”
Philip West, August 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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One Response to “Webmasters Vocalize about the Google Panda Update”
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The one good thing that has come out of this whole mess is that I have been forced to review my sites through a more critical eye. I have had to beef up some sparsley contented pages and fix a few neglected broken links. What I don’t like is just what you mentioned above. There are scrapers who have higher rankings than I do. My Google earnings usually drop during the summer season anyone, but I’ve noticed an additional 15-20 % drop this summer. Hopefully, Google will tweak things in the right direction so that we “little guys with high-quality Web content” can regain our rankings.