Tag: Panda

Why Panda is the New Coke

Editor’s Note: The author of this post, Morris Rosenthal, runs Foner Books – a site which was heavily impacted by Google’s Panda update. WebProNews took a closer look at his story here. It’s an interesting look at how a legitimate author with seemingly high quality content, but perhaps not the most modern site design, took a big hit from the update. We don’t know that this is the primary reason, but Rosenthal offers his thoughts on this in the piece.

Do you think Google’s results are better post-Panda? Let us know in the comments.

I was still in college back in 1985 when the Coca-Cola Company changed their secret formula and launched the New Coke. The company had become concerned over competition from archrival Pepsi-Cola, especially with regard to locking in a new generation of brand loyal soda drinkers. So Coca-Cola created a sweeter formulation they hoped would appeal to young drinkers and embarked on extensive taste testing. Armed with incontrovertible evidence that the majority of soda drinkers preferred the new formulation over both Pepsi and the original Coke, the company discontinued their flagship drink and rolled out the New Coke. We all know the rest of the story.

After a decade of dominating the Internet search space with their eponymous Google search engine, the search quality engineers at Google began to worry about public discontent over search results. The complaint that grew louder and louder in the Internet community was the presence of Made For Adsense (MFA) sites winning top rankings in search. Adsense is the Google program that pays publishers to host advertising brokered by Google on their website. The bar for becoming an Adsense publisher is extremely low, so sites producing hundreds of thousands and millions of pages of meaningless garbage sprung up with the sole purpose of making quick money for their owners. Many MFA sites feature copyright infringements, scrapings of other web pages and low quality syndicated content.

So Google engineers concluded they needed a new way to provide consumers with relevant search results and began working on a search algorithm upgrade known as Panda. The goal of the Panda update was to introduce a quality filter for the search rankings based on, of all things, blind taste tests. While Google doesn’t share details about their internal engineering processes, they admit to recruiting hundreds of testers to grade a sample of web pages based on such criteria as, “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card?” and “Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?” I term this a blind taste test because Google gives no indication that their testers were asked to actually search for solutions to real problems and then judge the quality of the answers provided.

Next comes the tricky part. Google engineers tried to quantify how the scores they were already calculating for websites agreed with the quality judgments of their taste testers. By figuring out which parts of the score correlated with the winners of the website beauty pageant, they hoped discover a new recipe for relevant results. According to Google, the new weightings actually made sense when they looked at the results, and on February 23 of 2011 they rolled out the Panda update, creating a New Google.

Back in the Eighties when Coca-Cola was running their taste tests, it turned out that people chose the sweetest drink. Thanks to the efforts of search analysts who make a living monitoring Google results, we know what types of websites those Google testers chose. The sites that benefitted from the Panda update were a laundry list of brand names including: Amazon, Walmart, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, government websites and Sears.

And the how-to site so many searchers love to hate, eHow.com, was a surprising winner in an update that was intended to wipe out content farms. By employing hundreds of testers Google learned this important truth. Asked to grade random web pages, average people will trust those where they recognize the name or approve of the aesthetics. Slapping a familiar looking eCommerce template around a couple hundred words of scraped content is the Internet equivalent of adding sugar.

All of which would be small cocoa beans in the Internet world if not for the collateral damage caused by the Google update. Thousands of Mom-n-Pop websites, a sampling of which have been singled out for praise by universities, mainstream media, NGO’s and government agencies, have been given the heave-ho by Google with U.S. search traffic falling by 50% or more. The author of this article, whose homely Foner Books website was featured in a 2008 article about laptop repair in the New York Times, has seen U.S. Google traffic website fall by half. Many of the sites now appearing above the author’s site in Google search results are copyright infringements on the author’s work monetized with Google Adsense, and in many cases, those infringements have been syndicated to hundreds or thousands of other MFA sites.

Adding injury to insult, a Google search Laptop Repair Workbook, this author’s most popular eBook, now brings up a piracy directory in the #1 slot. Visitors to the piracy directory are randomly redirected to a fake anti-virus site that immediate tries to infect their computer.

Google spokespeople, in their public pronouncements, insist that the Panda update is a great success, and that consumers are happy with the new results. I haven’t seen any surveys, but I’ve been reading the sole web forum thread started by a Google employee for publishers who feel that their website has been unfairly treated by the update, and there are 750 votes against. There are also no replies from Google employees through any channel of communications.

Out in the broader world of discussion lists, publishers who were affected by the update often accuse those who weren’t impacted of drinking Google’s Kool-Aid. After fifteen years of writing and publishing online and off, it tastes more to me like the New Coke.

Have a post-Panda story? Share it in the comments.

March 28, 2011
EzineArticles Traffic Update Post Panda

Early on in the aftermath of Google’s Panda algorithm update (sometimes referred to as the “Farmer” update), EzineArticles was reported to be one of the hardest hit sites. The following week, CEO Chris Knight told WebProNews, “We’ve had quite a few niche categories go up in traffic but the overall is still lower than before last Thursday.”

Still, Knight immediately began making big changes to the operations of the site, in an effort to quickly recovered the lost traffic. We looked at some of that here.

Now, Knight has a blog post/video up, responding to a question from a user, who was under the impression that the site has lost 90% of its traffic. “It’s not true,” Knight said. “Recently, Google had an update that hit us, and we lost between ten and thirty-five percent of our traffic.”

“In our eleven-year history of EzineArticles.com, we’ve never been hit by an update until now,” Knight said, referencing the fact that Google’ makes updates about every day.

“This update went after ‘thin content’,” he added. “This is low-quality derivative content. In fact, we agree with Google on this update, and we’ve made sweeping changes to our quality review system – our editorial guidelines our internal processes.”

“Every year since we began – every month actually – we’ve risen the quality bar. However, in the last few weeks, we’ve risen a year’s worth of quality bar raising in about a two-week period of time. In an effort to weed out thin, derivative, low-quality content, and highlight and identify what is the absolute best content. In fact, I’ve never been more proud of the content I see in EzineArticles.com today, and I’m really happy about…I’m not happy about losing the traffic, but I’m really excited about the quality of the content I see now.”

“In conclusion…we did not lose 90% of our traffic,” Knight said. “In fact, some markets within our 700-niche markets that we serve, went up. Others went down, but overall, we lost between ten and thirty-five percent of our traffic, but we still are serving over one million visitors a day.”

Knight would not respond to a recent request for comment on EzineArticles’ traffic.

One important fact for this site (and any other site affected by the Panda update) to consider is that Google has only launched the update in the US so far. There are some rumblings in the forums that Google may have launched Panda in the UK, but comments from UK webmasters seem to dispell the notion. We’ve heard nothing about it from Google so far.

When Google first launched the update, Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts said, in these exact words, “To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.”

Unless your site gets all of its traffic from the U.S., you may be in for further damage from Panda, if you’ve already been affected by it. This will be true each time it rolls out in another country. That is, if you haven’t made adjustments to your content that keep it up to Google’s quality standards.

Of course, that’s easier said than done, because Google doesn’t exactly give you a manual. There are some things we know, and some other things that are possible, however, that may help.

EzineArticles.comDon’t settle for the results you’re getting today, even if they are great. Always look to create greater results tomorrow & be phenomenal! 2 days ago · 7 likes · Comment

@ChrisKnight
Chris KnightI’ve rec’d some pretty nasty hate mail & I fear it’s going to get much worse as our article rejection rate climbs even more steeply today. 27 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

@ChrisKnight
Chris KnightUser-generated content that is extensively human quality controlled & thoughtfully curated is not a content farm. 23 days ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

@ChrisKnight
Chris KnightLoved this forum comment someone made: “There is such a thing as too much “quality control” & EzineArticles has gone far beyond that point!” 19 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

March 28, 2011
Google Panda Update: Lack of Consistency on Quality?

We’ve been talking with a lot of people who have had their sites impacted negatively by Google’s recent “Panda” algorithm update. Our thinking is that the more sides of the story we hear, the more webmasters and content producers will be able to learn from it. With that, we had a conversation with Paul Edmondson, CEO of HubPages, which made the list of the hardest-hit sites.

Have you gained additional insight into the Panda Update as time has progressed? Share in the comments.

HubPages, which launched in 2006 as a social content community for writers to write “magazine-like articles”, pays 60% from the ad impressions to the writers. You may find how-to articles, not unlike those you would find at eHow, but also in a variety of other styles. Authors on HubPages publish nearly 3,000 “Hubs” a day, over 7,000 comments and thousands of questions and answers and forum posts, according to Edmondson. Last year, there were over 13,000 total incremental pieces of content a day, he said.

When directly asked if HubPages is a content farm, Edmondson told us, “Actually, HubPages is to articles what YouTube is to video. Like YouTube where enthusiasts post videos of their choice, our community write articles about whatever they wish and are passionate about. This covers a wide range of content from poetry to recipes, and pretty much everything in between. Writers choose what they write about, and they own their content. In return, they stand behind the content, build readership and interact within the HubPages community.”

On where HubPages stands out compared to sites from Demand Media, Associated Content, and others, Edmondson said, “First, we think authors rule! We align our interests with our authors – and this is key to our long-term success. At HubPages, authors choose what they write about and they own the content they write. We also share impressions with the author for as long as the content is published on HubPages. Our incentives are aligned with the authors’ needs. At its core, HubPages is a passionate community of writers. The value that is created goes well beyond the revenue opportunity,” he said. “To have a truly healthy ecosystem, writers need social interaction, feedback and praise. To this end, HubPages has offered the ability to fan authors – which turned out to be commonly known as ‘follow’ in 2006. Some authors have thousands of followers for everything they publish. We also developed an accolade system to give back positive feedback and encouragement. When these items are combined, HubPages is revealed to be a very unique collection of people, with authentic voices, sharing their knowledge with the world.”

When asked how frequently HubPages articles rank among the top results for searches in Google, Edmondson said, “Some of our content ranks very high, and some isn’t in the index at all. We don’t have the data to answer this question for every piece of content and the potential search terms that a Hub could rank for in the search results.”

When asked if articles are written specifically for search, he said, “It’s up to our writers. We let them choose what they wish to write within our editorial policies. We offer tools and education for our users to become better online writers – this includes – among a vast array of things – best practices for search.”

“SEO has to be an important part of any publisher’s traffic sources,” he said. “We make SEO tools available to our writers, its up to them whether they want to use it or not. We are very sensitive around not abusing search engine practices and will take down articles that are obviously trying to game the system.”

We had a separate conversation with a HubPages writer, who for this article will just go by the name Chuck. He is a college economics instructor. Chuck tells us, “HubPages is a very good site for earning money. This has been both my experience as well as that of other writers on the site who have published Hubs on their earnings experience.”

Chuck says the freedom to write on whatever topics a writer wants to write about is one of the main things that makes HubPage attractive. “This not only allows writers, including me, to focus on topics that interest or excite us but also gives us freedom to explore new areas of writing. I find that this freedom offers me an opportunity to challenge myself as well as the opportunity to broaden the range of my writing. It also lets me test the money making potential of other areas outside my immediate area of interest and expertise.”

Chuck says the HubPages team is constantly updating the site by regularly giving writers new tools to work with. “These changes and updates also include continual updating of the look and feel of the site which keeps it fresh and new-looking for visitors,” he says. “HubPages has an excellent training area on the site which enables both new and existing users to learn how to use the various tools as well as allowing all of us to keep our skills current in other business aspects of the site.”

“The Professionalism and quality of the site attracts good writers which in turn attracts increasing numbers of viewers which benefits all of us,” he continues. “The HubPages team puts a strong emphasis on marketing which not only continually brings in new viewers and writers, but also enables the team to keep writers informed about current reading tastes and habits of visitors.”

“HubPages is also a good social networking site,” he adds. “ It offers the opportunity to meet and interact with others from around the world both through exchanges on Hubs as well as in the Forums. In addition to learning from the writings of others and comments left on my Hubs and those of others that I read, I have met and been in direct contact with a few people both Hubbers and visitors which have resulted in some mutually beneficial exchanges of information. These exchanges have included my receiving some photographs from fellow Hubber Ralph Deeds which I was able to use on 2 of my Hubs. On my Hub about Mathew Juan I was contacted by a visitor who not only provided me with additional information for my research but I was also able to provide him with some information which he used to update his website. I received a nice email from a local artist whose work I wrote about on my Hub about Public Art who requested permission to use my photos in his advertising. I have had other, similar exchanges, on of which I am still following up on and which might lead to some paid writing assignments.”

Chuck says he’s never written for Demand Media, Associated Content, or Suite101 (all of which have seen some impact from the Panda update – some more than others). “However, I have done some writing for TheInfomine.com, MyGeoInfo.com, Xomba.com and SheToldMe.com,” Chuck says. “ Most of my writing on all of these have consisted of articles related to Hubs I have written (but not copies) with links back to my related Hub article. I have collected a few dollars in Google Adsense money from these but am reconsidering keeping my AdSense code on them as I believe it was Jimmy The Jock in his piece on Success Stories who said that he found he made more Adsense earnings by not having ads on outside sites as more of the readers then tended to go to his Hubs rather than wandering off to an ad on the other site. His experience showed him that bringing the people to HubPages generated more ad clicks.”

Last week, HubPages launched a new ad platform. “Changing the long-held equation between advertisers and individual online writers, HubPages is launching its HubPages Ad Program that will give its writers access to the premium ad rates that so far have been restricted to giant publishers,” Edmondson said. “This offering is the first time that any online writer will be able to access significant advertising revenues, as available via premium advertising networks and direct sales, while retaining all rights to their own content.Individual writers have always been considered too small to be worth advertiser attention and the agency model wasn’t built to work with millions of content producers. While the democratization of content has occurred, the earning power has not been available until now. HubPages is leveraging its size and scale as a top 50 site (Quantcast) to negotiate better ad money on behalf of our writers.”

Edmondson addressed the Panda update on the HubPages blog recently, saying that they hadn’t seen it consistently drive traffic to better-quality Hubs. “On one hand, some of our best content has seen a drop in traffic; simultaneously, we have seen traffic rise on Hubs that are just as great,” he wrote. “We are taking this seriously — behind the scenes, we have been crunching data and focusing on making sure that we are doing everything right from our side. We have an editorial policy and internal system that rewards original useful content, and this aligns with what Google wants, too.”

“We have several internal quality metrics that make up HubScore and we have deeply analyzed things like content length, view duration, Hub Hopper ratings, and HubScore,’ he added. “These elements have been compared to changes in Google referrals, and again, based on the way we rate content quality, the fluctuation so far looks random at this stage of the update. We believe that a change of this size will take a settling-in period. We have reached out to Google and will continue to study the update.”

Like any other site that has user-generated content or a massive amount of articles, it stands to reason that there is a mix of both good and bad quality content on HubPages – not unlike YouTube. It’s how Google ranks the content in search results that ultimately matters to users of the search engine, which at this time accounts for the majority of Internet users. HubPages’ quality metrics are probably not identical to Google’s quality metrics, but it’s interesting that Endmondson thinks some of the site’s best content was negatively impacted. My guess is that HubPages is not alone in this.

We’ve still seen examples in the wild, where Google continues to rank less authoritative content over more authoritative results. We’ve referred to the “level 4 brain cancer” example several times, which continues to show an eHow article as the top result over actual experts in the brain cancer field. In fact, one of our own articles is even showing up on the first page now (presumably from having referenced it a few times). While we’re flattered that Google would consider us enough of an authority on the subject, I think users would still prefer to see more useful advice from a medical standpoint.

Another interesting side story to this whole Google search quality thing is that Google has a patent application out for essentially what Demand Media does – suggesting topics for people to write about based on search. Are we going to see Knol results “filling in the gaps”? More on that here.

Many of the sites hit hardest by the Panda update are trying to find ways to become less dependent on Google. It’s wise not to be too dependent on any one traffic source anyway, but the Panda update has really driven this point home. HubPages has taken some time to improve its own internal search. As Mike Moran said in a recent article, this is a good way to keep from driving your visitors back to Google to find what they’re looking for.

For additional insight: Google “Panda” Algorithm Update – What’s Known & What’s Possible

Thoughts on Google’s search quality post-Panda? Share in the comments.

March 23, 2011
Google Panda Update Still Encouraging Higher Quality

We had a conversation recently with HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson about the Google Panda update and its affects no HubPages, as it was often reported to be one of the hardest-hit sites from the update.

Edmondson had said in a recent blog post that they hadn’t seen it consistently drive traffic to better-quality Hubs. “On one hand, some of our best content has seen a drop in traffic; simultaneously, we have seen traffic rise on Hubs that are just as great,” he wrote. “We are taking this seriously — behind the scenes, we have been crunching data and focusing on making sure that we are doing everything right from our side. We have an editorial policy and internal system that rewards original useful content, and this aligns with what Google wants, too.”

HubPages has posted a new message to users, regarding the update, conveying a continued quest to boost quality:

As we continue to adjust our way through the most recent Google algorithm changes, we are actively reviewing how we can improve the HubPages experience and make adjustments to improve the site and experience. As mentioned in previous posts, we have already made some changes, primarily focused at weeding out lower quality content that adds little to no value to the site and community and to optimize the advertising layouts. In the upcoming weeks, I expect to announce further changes we will implement aimed at improving sitewide experience and quality of Hubs. We have various methods for measuring “quality” including HubScore, community ratings and feedback, link quality, etc.

I appreciate everyone’s patience as we devise and implement our next course of action. The most important effect of the next wave of changes will be to our writers who will benefit from a rise in the overall quality of content published on HubPages and the removal of lower quality content that tends to decrease traffic and visitors’ experience to the site. I see a lot of great discussions in the forums and am encouraged to see so many active members of the community that are just as concerned and motivated to improve the site as we are.

Demand Media’s eHow, which is sometimes compared to HubPages, just launched a redesign with what the company is calling a “curation layer,” which is essentially a feedback system, also aimed at improving quality.

Having such ways of monitoring quality and audience perception has to be in the best interest of both of these sites. It may be that how they handle the feedback and use it to improve content that helps them both in the long run – and that’s not just for Google’s algorithm, by the way, but for users who are gaining more control over the distribution of content, whether that be through social sharing, or through blocking domains in their own search results.

If a user gets enough poor quality content from a single site when searching, Google has empowered them to be able to do something about it. This is one reason that any site might do well to do some evaluation of past content, and perhaps some house cleaning where necessary.

March 17, 2011
Suite101 CEO Writes Open Letter to Google’s Matt Cutts

Google basically called out Suite101 as the poster child site of what its “Panda” algorithm update was aimed at. Reports have found the site to be one of the hardest hit, and while the site has often been mentioned in the same breath as sites like eHow in the past, eHow has apparently gained from the update.

When asked about it in a recent Wired interview, Google’s Matt Cutts said, “I feel pretty confident about the algorithm on Suite 101.”

We had reached out to Suite101 prior to the publication of that article, but only since it was published, have we heard back. A representative for Suite101 pointed us to an open letter to Matt Cutt from CEO Peter Berger, in response to the comments from the Wired piece. Here is a sample of the letter (read the whole thing in its entirety here):

We have certainly noticed that within the last week Google has stopped sending our content as many readers as it had in the past, resulting in a decline of 30% in overall traffic. We have been working to understand what separates successful content on our site from negatively impacted content, and have also tried to compare how other sites on the web rank for given Google queries.

We do not get the sense that this “Panda” algorithm update is about filtering out “low quality” content. We do appreciate that Google is constantly trying to improve immediate user relevance for given search queries. That means that Google has to experiment with evaluating measurable properties of content in alternative ways. Engineers might refer to these properties or signals as “quality” (within the context of a given search query), but please do understand that when a representative of Google describes entire sites as “low quality” outside of engineering circles, this can be perceived as insulting by people who associate “quality” rather with an individual piece’s execution, angle and craft, and who have taken great pride in creating it.

We take it that concise, high quality writing is a signal that Google de-emphasized with its algorithm update. That is a legitimate business decision, even if some of the content we currently publish does not benefit from it. Other factors have become more important, and we will try to understand them, and work to help those of our writers who feel that Google is the best distribution channel for their thoughts to improve their articles.

For the sake of the web as the rich ecosystem it is, we hope that Google stays committed to:

* a page-by-page evaluation of the web’s content, emphasizing its actual “content” over its display and polish

* respect of copyright, diligently ensuring original content is not outranked by scraped content

* impartiality in terms of content’s ownership, including treating publicly listed corporations’ as well as Google’s own content not differently from the rest of the web

Another level of depth may be added to this discussion if the word “quality” were more fully defined. “Quality” without much more precisely defining it, especially when the quality mentioned does only seem to be a quality signal relating to a given search query, leaves a lot still misunderstood…

We spoke with Berger last year, long before this update was realized, but during a time when search quality was really starting to come into question as content farm sites were really on the rise.

Berger told us, “Every week, several thousand people apply to become Suite101 writers. While we only accept a portion of applicants based on our non-negotiable quality standards, we do have many successful writers on our site who do not consider themselves ‘writers.”
“We see it as Suite101′s mission to enable people – anyone who can write well and with deep understanding of a subject – to achieve their goals,” he said. “These might be earning money, addressing large audiences, building up a personal professional brand, or simply enjoying creative freedom in a nurturing, peer-oriented environment.”

Cutts has yet to respond to the letter, at least in the comments section, but it hasn’t been live very long, and Cutts is keeping pretty busy from the sound of things.

March 5, 2011
Google “Panda” Algorithm Update – What’s Known & What’s Possible

Google’s recent algorithm update aimed at improving the quality of search results has captured a great deal of attention – both positive and negative. The general consensus seems to be that the results are in fact better now, but still not perfect. Perfection will likely never be achieved, but there are still some glaring criticisms out there about Google’s most recent attempt.

Having had some time to reflect, what is your opinion of the update? Let us know in the comments.

Despite the improvement in overall search quality in general, there have been many sites to suffer the consequences of the update – some deservedly and others maybe not so much. As Google will never reveal its secret recipe in its entirety, there are plenty of clues out there, and even facts that Google will share. You can criticize Google’s mystique all you want, but there’s not denying that they do communicate with the webmaster community to a great extent, even if they don’t always tell you everything you want to hear.

Google’s Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal – two of the most instrumental voices in the recent update – shared some clues and insights in an interview with Wired this week. Before we get to specifics, there were some interesting things mentioned by the two that are worth noting. For example, Caffeine, which sped Google’s indexing, led to a flood of content – both good and bad. This seems to have helped the “shallow” kinds of content that this most recent update targeted – not stuff that is quite spam, but…well, shallow. We also learned that Google calls the update “Panda”.

They revealed that prior to the update, they sent out documents to outside testers/raters, and asked them questions about quality. It would be interesting to know who these raters were, but no such luck there. Users were asked things like whether they would feel comfortable giving a site their credit card info or giving medicine from the site to their kids (I wonder if anyone was asked if they felt comfortable getting their brain cancer information from a freelance eHow writer with no credentials in the field), whether they considered the site to be authoritative, whether it would be ok in a magazine, whether it has “excessive” ads, and other questions. It would be great to be able to know more of those questions, but we can only work with what Google has revealed.

“And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality,” Singhal is quoted as saying.

“We actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side,” said Cutts. “And you can really see mathematical reasons…”

“I got an e-mail from someone who wrote out of the blue and said, ‘Hey, a couple months ago, I was worried that my daughter had pediatric multiple sclerosis, and the content farms were ranking above government sites,’” Cutts is later quoted as saying. “Now, she said, the government sites are ranking higher. So I just wanted to write and say thank you.’”

Again, why is eHow still ranking for “level 4 brain cancer”?

Google says it still looks at feedback, and Cutts even said that if someone has a specific question about why a site dropped, he thinks it’s “fair and justifiable and defensible to tell them why that site dropped.” He also said that Google’s most recent algorithm contains signals that can be gamed (hence the lack of full transperency). In other words, it can still be optimized for.

Finally, the site Suite101, which data from SearchMetrics lists as the biggest loser in percentage (in its organic performance index) was brought up in the interview. Suite101 and eHow are often compared and labeled as “content farm” type sites. When asked why Suite101 took a much bigger hit than eHow, Cutts simply said, “I feel pretty confident about the algorithm on Suite 101.”

It would be very helpful to understand the differences Google sees between these two sites. It doesn’t seem very clear by looking through the sites that there are obvious differences in quality. I’m sure it varies on both.

We reached out to Suite101 a few days ago for comment on the update and its impact, but have yet to receive a response. I’m even more interested to hear what they have to say, now that these comments have come out. Update: Suite101 referred us to an open letter from CEO Peter Berger to Google’s Matt Cutts.

CEO Peter Berger stressed the importance of quality in content when we spoke with him last year.

“Every week, several thousand people apply to become Suite101 writers,” he told us. “While we only accept a portion of applicants based on our non-negotiable quality standards, we do have many successful writers on our site who do not consider themselves ‘writers’.”

“We see it as Suite101’s mission to enable people – anyone who can write well and with deep understanding of a subject – to achieve their goals,” he said. “These might be earning money, addressing large audiences, building up a personal professional brand, or simply enjoying creative freedom in a nurturing, peer-oriented environment.”

Results from people with a deep understanding of a subject should lend themselves to quality. Whether or not Suite101 delivers on this is open for debate. Clearly Google doesn’t think so, practically making the site the poster-child of what not to do. The mysteries continue…

What we know Google is looking at with the Panda update:

– User comfort level in the trust area (think credit card/medicine comments)

– Is it considered authoritative (this would apply some indication of expertise on topics covered, I would think)

– Is the content quality good enough for print? (I’ve seen plenty of crap printed)

– Are there too many ads? (How many are too many, and does the ad network matter?)

– We know Google has its definition of what could be considered low quality

– Google uses a “classifier” to draw a line in the sand

– We know that so far, Google has not used indications from the Chrome Extension (emphasis on so far. Google hinted in the past that this data could potentially be used to tweak the algorithm).

– Google looks at feedback, at least to some extent

– Based on comments from Cutts, Google will tell you why your site dropped (getting that communication flow going may not be the easiest thing to do, but I have personally witnessed Cutts sit down with someone at a conference and look at their site with them.)

– The algorithm can still be gamed. It can still be optimized for. (If you were hit by the update, there are things you can do to get back in Google’s good graces. In other words, you’re not necessarily banned just because of your brand.)

– Most of the changes in rankings will be done algorithmically, but Google will take manual action in some instances (see JC Penney)

-If you use any auto-generated content keep it separated from the original high quality stuff, and block it from search engines. Google’s John Mu said recently, “If you do have such high-quality, unique and compelling content, I’d recommend separating it from the auto-generated rest of the site, and making sure that the auto-generated part is blocked from crawling and indexing, so that search engines can focus on what makes your site unique and valuable to users world-wide.”

This is basically in line with another statement from Google obtained by Search Engine Land: “Sites that believe they have been adversely impacted by the change should be sure to extensively evaluate their site quality. In particular, it’s important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site. Publishers who believe they’ve been impacted can also post in our webmaster forums to let us know. We will consider feedback from publishers and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms.”

If you can think of anything else that is “known” about this update, please feel free to comment.

We won’t jump to any conclusions, but here are…

Some things that are possible that may be worth considering:

– Old fashioned design may play a role. Simply from the aesthetic point of view, this may make a site appear less trustworthy (less likely that consumers will be willing to give up their credit care info). We wonder if this played a role in the EzineArticles and Foner Books examples we looked at.

– There is possibly a threshold that can be crossed for what is considered too many ads before your site gets points taken off for quality. Some have tried reducing the number of ads (again, see EzineArticles) to try and boost rankings.

– Duplicate content (to some degree) may play a role in this recent update. EzineArticles, again, is a prime candidate for this. Articles from the site are published other places – probably the majority of the content from the site is duplicated at other places (besides just scrapers). eHow content is uniquely written for eHow. There are plenty of people that will suggest much of this content is rewritten based on other existing articles, but that’s beside the point. The content itself is unique to eHow (again, scrapers aside).

Other sites like Business Insider, The Huffington Post, and even the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal will syndicate content from other blogs, but this duplicate content does not make up the majority of the content from these sites, and this is probably why it’s not frowned upon in these cases. Even WebProNews has had a blog partner program in place for years, in which we syndicate select posts from our partners, but this content has never dominated WebProNews. It’s never been the majority of what we publish, but a small percentage.

– Excessive amounts of very short articles may be a factor taken into consideration, because if that’s the majority of what you put out, the majority of your content is likely “shallow”. Now sometimes, short posts are sufficient. Sometimes there’s just not that much to say, but if these kinds of posts dominate, there’s a good chance there IS more to say about a lot of it, and someone else probably IS saying it, which makes those people better candidates for better rankings.

– eHow may still be ranking well at least partially because it has established a lot of backlinks over time. The nature of these links could come into play. There is some interesting discussion about this in a WebmasterWorld thread.

– Better, consistent page structure could also play a role (as brought up in that same thread…look at ehow vs HubPages (which was hit by the update).

– Update: PotPieGirl.com has some very interesting data, after running a test on seven key phrases that attract large amounts of spammy content. This might be very telling of at least one aspect of the Panda update. The following chart sayst it all. Look at the difference in percentages between EzineArticles and eHow.

Another dataset looks at the same phrases for articles just from the last month:

“In the last month, Ezine Articles has had close to 39,000 urls found/crawled in the Google index that have one of these 7 phrases on them. That means that 2.82% of the EzineArticles.com urls Google has found/crawled in the last month have this phrase on them,” says Jennifer (Pot Pie Girl), who put this data together. “That is almost 39 THOUSAND web pages in the Google index in the past month with one of those 7 phrases on them – from ONE SITE.”

More on what Google Algorithm Update casualties have to say.

If you have any insight into more things Google may be looking at (specific to this update), discuss these in the comments as well.

March 4, 2011