The Panda attacks the Farmer
(picture from Rick Weiss)
Earlier this year, Google began rolling out changes to the algorithms used to rank the value of the Web sites in Google's index. These changes were aimed at "content farms" - sites that steal copy content from other sites (a practice known as "scraping") or post vast amounts of low-value content, such as poorly-written blog posts written by poorly-paid freelancers.
These changes (nicknamed "Panda" after the name of one of Google's engineers) have been effective. Sites that formerly ranked highly in Goggle's index, such as articlesbase.com, associatedcontent.com, suite101.com, and eHow.com, have seen their traffic drop way off. Even "real" sites like About.com have seen noticeable drops in the numbers of Web visitors.
Bad pages can hurt your entire site
Google has confirmed that the change in their ranking algorithms doesn't just apply to the low-value pages themselves. A site that contains a mixture of low-value and high-value pages can have the ranking reduced on all their pages due to the low-value pages.
This is probably what happened to About.com. Although the site (which is owned by the New York Times) did have genuine people with real identities acting as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and posting lots of high-value content, there were plenty of subject areas where the Experts were, well, not so expert. If some of those SMEs were manually scraping other sites to get the content for their subject areas on About.com, Google's newly tweaked ranking algorithms may have reduced the ranking of the good information on About.com.
Implications for site owners
What does this mean for you and me?
When I started this blog earlier this year, I wanted to get in the habit of daily blogging, and establish my Web presence. I didn't know that my "bookmark" posts (where I posted links to sites that I thought would have value to Evolving Code Monkeys like myself) could do long-term damage to my site's Google ranking.
When I relaunch my Evolving Code Monkey blog (as EvolvingCodeMonkey.com) later in August, I'm going to focus on providing only high-value, original content. I won't try to blog something every day - rather, I'll go for posts two or maybe three times per week, on a schedule.
I'm going to maintain my current domain (edward.spurlock.cc), and if I feel the urge to post a "bookmark" post or some other low-value content, I'll add it to this blog, rather than diluting the quality at EvolvingCodeMonkey.com.
Google's 23 Questions to Improve Your Pages
In response to question from site owners and webmasters about the changes, Google's Webmaster Central blog provided some more guidance on building high-quality sites, including a list of 23 questions that webmasters could ask themselves about the content on their sites. These are the kinds of questions Google's testers were told to ask in formulating their judgments of page and site quality. I recommend reading the entire list and taking all the questions under consideration. However, the 23 questions can be summarized by the first question in the list:
Would you trust the information presented in this article?
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