Best Information About Google's Farmer/Panda Update.

[dbadwal]

Hi Everyone,


I was just reading an article over SEOMoz about Google's recent algorithm change, which affected a lot of marketers around the world. I was trying to figure out from last one month as to what has actually happened and how it affected a whole lot of websites. Here I am posting the article for your information. I am sure you'll love it. Here you go...........


By now, everyone in the SEO world is aware of the algorithmic update Google launched last Wednesday, February 23rd. Several posts on the topic are worth reading, including Danny Sullivan's take, Aaron Wall's assesment, SearchMetrics' analysis and Sistrix's data-driven post.
Here at SEOmoz, we've been analyzing the shift with help from our friends at Distilled, staff research scientist Dr. Matt Peters (whom you may remember from our Google Places analysis and who's now joined our staff full time - welcome!), and several other contributors. While there's no way to be precisely sure what Google changed to impact "11.8%" of queries, we've got some ideas that fit a number of the data points and we hope to contribute to the discussion on the topic and help search marketers gauge the update's impact on their own sites.

What Factors Could Have Caused Lost Rankings?

In reviewing the sites that got hit, we were struck by a few interesting, potential culprits.

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An eHow page on the left-hand side and an EzineArticles page on the right

1. It seemed that sites whose pages had fewer and/or less intrusive blocks of advertisements on them tended to be in the winner bucket, while those with more and more intrusive advertising tended to be in the loser group.
2. Likewise, sites whose UI/design would likely be described as more modern, high quality, thoughtful and "attractive" were winners vs. the "ugly" sites that tended to be in the loser bucket.
3. When it came to user-generated-content (UGC) sites, those that tended to attract "thin" contributions (think EzineArticles, Hubpages or Buzzle) lost, while those with richer, often more authentic, non-paid, and not-intended to build SEO value or links (think Etsy, DailyMotion, LinkedIn, Facebook) won.
4. In the "rich content" sector, pages with less usable/readable/easily-consumable content (think AllBusiness, FindArticles) tended to lose out to similarly content-rich sites that had made their work more usable (think LOC.gov, HuffingtonPost)

Based on these, we have some guesses about what signals Google may have used in this update:

• User/usage data - signals like click-through-rate, time-on-site, "success" of the search visit (based on other usage data)
• Quality raters - a machine-learning type algorithm could be applied to sites quality raters liked vs. didn't to build features/factors that would boost the "liked" sites and lower the "disliked" sites. This can be a dangerous way to build algorithms, though, because no human can really say why a site is ranking higher vs. lower or what the factors are - they might be derivatives of very weird datapoints rather than explainable mechanisms.
• Content analysis - topic modeling algorithms, those that calculate/score readability, uniqueness/robustness analysis and perhaps even visual "attractiveness" of content presentation could be used (or other signals that conform well to these).

More detailed analysis, particularly of individual pages that won vs. lost, may help to get more insight into these.


Here is the source of the article: Google's Farmer/Panda Update: Analysis of Winners vs. Losers | SEOmoz

[ayolov]

Are you sure about the design part? I have two UGLY sites and their ranking even improved slightly.
The quality rates seems like a new challenge...

[dbadwal]

Yes thats right. Design is the new challenge for 2011.

[mattlaclear]

More disinformation regarding Google's changes. Yummy. Too bad it's not true in the slightest. We use spun articles to backlink our clients services and we have grabbed 100 new page one rankings in the last two weeks alone. So whatever change G made rocks for us.

[markowe]

I'd love to see a machine tell the difference between what's a 'pretty' site design and what's an ugly one! Most PEOPLE can't tell, I've noticed...

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by mattlaclear

More disinformation regarding Google's changes. Yummy. Too bad it's not true in the slightest. We use spun articles to backlink our clients services and we have grabbed 100 new page one rankings in the last two weeks alone. So whatever change G made rocks for us.

Complete nonsense about EZA. Obviously that person never really
did any research.

That's sure a boat-load of links giving your people a pat on the back.
Even a welcome to the company message. Very, very strange.

Sounds more like one big advertisement for said company. And now we kow
the rest of the story.

Paul

[dbadwal]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Complete nonsense about EZA. Obviously that person never really
did any research.

That's sure a boat-load of links giving your people a pat on the back.
Even a welcome to the company message. Very, very strange.

Sounds more like one big advertisement for said company. And now we kow
the rest of the story.

Paul

Its not at all an advertisement for any company. If you know SEO then you must be knowing SEOMoz.org. They don't need this kind of advertisement. Its just showing you what I read. Some people have habit to smell some foul play in everything.

By the way I have lost 4 of my EZA ranking from first page of google for different niches. So I can say that this particular research result is true. I can't say anything for rest of them.

[JoMo]

Originally Posted by ayolov

Are you sure about the design part? I have two UGLY sites and their ranking even improved slightly.
The quality rates seems like a new challenge...

I don't think they mean ugly looking, but ugly design. There are lots of sites out there that are made very poorly.



-joel

[CliveG]

Originally Posted by JoMo

I don't think they mean ugly looking, but ugly design. There are lots of sites out there that are made very poorly.



-joel

Clean HTML and proper use of CSS seems to have been given greater weight slowly over the last 2 or 3 years. I've no evidence for this though just gut feel.

[markowe]

Originally Posted by CliveG

Clean HTML and proper use of CSS seems to have been given greater weight slowly over the last 2 or 3 years. I've no evidence for this though just gut feel.

MAYBE, but you are well aware that there are pages out there ranking no. 1 for some massive keywords that were put up 15 years ago and are an absolute disaster as regards HTML/CSS validity but you won't see them go away in a hurry. I guess all other things being equal that might be taken into consideration, but I am not sure it's going to ever be a deciding factor...

[CliveG]

Originally Posted by markowe

MAYBE, but you are well aware that there are pages out there ranking no. 1 for some massive keywords that were put up 15 years ago and are an absolute disaster as regards HTML/CSS validity but you won't see them go away in a hurry. I guess all other things being equal that might be taken into consideration, but I am not sure it's going to ever be a deciding factor...

I couldn't agree more. I act for a customer for whom I've been trying to out-position a much older on-topic but neglected website. I can get to #2 but I just can't get to #1. The other website has a "better" domain name too.