Major news websites such as the International Business Times and Reuters have posted a number of reports on the widespread effects of this Google Panda Update, and many more sites have reported being hit hard by this update.What is the Google Panda Update?The Google Panda Update is an update to its algorithms released by Google, the world’s largest search engine. The Google Panda Update is designed to demote sites that scrape or imitate content from other sites around the internet, a reminder of just how forceful Google can be when it comes to dealing with duplicate content. Siteswise
While this has boosted the ranking of some of the sites like YouTube or Vimeo, it has had a negative effect on many sites.What Sites have Been Affected by the Google Panda Update?The sites that appear to have been hit hardest are those that are known as “content farms”. Content farms are defined by Wikipedia as a site that hires large number of freelance and professional writers to create content that is designed to provide maximum retrieval of the produced text by search engines, thanks to the fact that it is written to satisfy the regulations of the Google algorithms.There are many websites that use content that is simply spam, but that contain high amounts of keywords and keyword phrases. The Google Panda Update is designed to demote those sites and drop their rankings through the floor. Now, instead of focusing exclusively on the keywords used on these sites, the Google Panda Update is causing the search engine to look through the content to find text that is actually relevant and accurate.The main sites that have been hit by this update have been:Sites such as Demand Media, Suite 101, Answers.com, and many other sites that use a large amount of text with keywords that is simply content to improve rankings of individual websites.A number of technology sites that provide similar reviews on the same product have also taken a serious hit, with one of the major tech review sites in the UK not even making it onto the first two pages of a Google search results list.