I was interested in the Guardian’s article on the recent “Panda” update to the Google search algorithm. The article reports that a number of well-known technology sites have been hit by the update:
Pocket Lint, Electric Pig, Tech Radar, TechEye, The Register’s hardware site RegHardware, PC Advisor, IT Pro Portal and the venerableComputer Weekly sites have all been hit by the reordering, which means that they fall down in Google’s rankings on any given set of keywords – and so their traffic from search results falls dramatically.
Although the quest for quality will inevitably mean that there are as many winners as well as losers, some of these sites are about as far away from “search engine spam” as you can get. It’s great that engineers are working on improving the quality of SERPS, but I hope that Google doesn’t end up throwing out good quality sites with the bad ones.
Whilst it’s true that those sites are legitimate, it’s probably more a case of the SEO strategies they have adopted to boost their rankings being similar to those used by search engine spam – from the algorithm’s perpective at least.
Tom, of course you’re right. However, if I was a publisher I’d be pretty upset. Google punishes you for doing things for which previously they rewarded you. Not only that but they won’t even tell you the “rules” that you have broken. I guess the conclusion has to be that search algorithms are still far from perfect – at least the engineers at Google will be happy knowing that they are still needed to improve the product!