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Google Panda Update Released

Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 10:48 am
by expate124
By the end of the year, according to comScore, two of the content farms—Demand Media (of eHow notoriety) and Answers.com—were firmly among the top 20 web properties in the U.S. Demand Media is the poster child for content farms and by far the largest, publishing 7,000 pieces of content a day… The company’s operations are based on a simple formula: create large amounts of niche, mostly bland content targeted at search engines, then make it viral through social software and make tons of money from advertising.

In January 2011, Business Insider published a headline that telegram dating philippines summed it all up: Google’s Search Algorithm Is Broken, It’s Time to Return to Curation.

In another article, they noted:

Demand is pulling off its smartest trick yet by engaging in massive arbitrage on the Google ecosystem. Demand contracts thousands of freelancers to produce hundreds of thousands of pieces of low-quality content, with topics chosen based on their search value, much of it driven by Google. Google’s algorithm places Demand content higher on the search engine results page because Google’s algorithm values ​​prolific and consistent content more than high-quality content.

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There’s no doubt that headlines like this had a big impact on Google, which responded by developing the Panda algorithm.


Panda was first launched on February 23, 2011.

On February 24th, Google published a blog post about the update and stated that they had made a sizeable algorithmic improvement to our rankings — a change that apparently impacted 11.8% of queries.

The explicit purpose of the update is as follows:

The update is designed to reduce the rankings of low-quality sites - those that have low added value to users, content that is copied from other sites, or is not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites - those that have original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis, etc.

Search Engine Land founder Danny Sullivan initially referred to it as the “Farmer” update. However, Google later revealed that it was internally known as “Panda,” the name of the engineer who came up with the major algorithm breakthrough.

Analysis of winners and losers by companies like SearchMetrics and SISTRIX found that the hardest-hit sites looked very familiar to anyone working in the SEO ( search engine optimization ) industry at the time.

These sites include wisegeek.com, ezinearticles.com, suite101.com, hubpages.com, buzz.com, articlebase.com, and many more.

Notably, content farms eHow and wikiHow performed better after the update. Subsequent updates also hurt these more acceptable content farms, with Demand Media losing $6.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2012.