Google Panda Update Changes Web Landscape In 2011

Several websites are in danger of extinction following Google’s “Panda” update, which is simply a euphemism for changes to google’s ranking algorithm for websites. Google’s latest update has led web-based businesses to accuse the serach engine company of adopting practices that oppose competition, according to Guardian which reports that their could be a formal objection by the European Commission against Google’s “abuse of power”.

Several website owners who depended on their online income for a living found to their horror that their sites’ traffic had “halved overnight”, according to the Guardian report. This drop in traffic was owing to Google’s “Panda update”, a tweak in Google’s search ranking system. As a results sites that appeared within the first 10 search results for a particular keyword found themselves relegated to as far back as the 300th.

And given that 89% of clicks by searchers on Google are restricted to the first 10 results, it is no wonder that website owners, particularly in the US, have had to bid goodbye to their livelihoods earned online.

Google did not stop with a single update. It followed up with another, barely weeks later, and with every subsequent “Panda” update, websites saw a further fall in their visitors.

Guardian has quoted a website owner as stating, “We were crushed by the Panda update, and the site is now gasping for breath… Traffic is down 75%, revenue is down 90%, and I’m getting seriously worried about the future… Everybody says not to rely on Google, but there’s no way around it.”

Google’s serach system is popularly believed to be 100% automated but in fact, its engineers are working round the clock to change the way the search engine ranks sites.

The “Panda” update is ostensibly aimed at downgrading “content farms” to rid the web of copied content or content that is otherwise useless. Whether this is actually achieved is debatable as several British technology news websites have lost income as a result. Conseuqently, under the scanner of the European commission is Google’s dominance of the search industry, with Google enjoying nearly 95% of searches in Europe and about 82% in North America.

The commission could force Google to comply with strictures that will determine the way Google treats rival sites that offer searches; Google could also be made to pay millions of pounds, in fines, according to the Guardian report.

A number of companies, including Foundem.com, a British “vertical search engine” company, are said to have complained to the EC about a year ago, compelling it to begin its investigation.

Foundem claimed it lost out in Google’s search rankings in spite of complying with Google’s publicly-stated rules. The founders, Shivaun and Adam Raff, are said to have discovered, one morning in 1996, that their site had vanished.

Shivaan Raff went so far as to state that Google itself coopies everything and therefore by its own rules should be downgraded. The Founden founder averred that the Panda updates were prompted by both the EC’s move as well as an anti-trust investigation against the search engine company by USA’s Federal Trade Commission.

The Guardian report has quoted Raff as saying, “Panda is a collection of disparate updates… It also marks an aggressive escalation of Google’s war on rival vertical search services. First, vertical search services are in many ways the polar opposite of content farms – because they link to multiple different sites, rather than containing content on one site.

“Second, Google’s anticompetitive demotion of rival vertical search services, while simultaneously promoting its own, lies at the heart of ongoing antitrust investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Panda wasn’t just deployed in the midst of these investigations; we suggest that it was deployed in direct response to them. By bundling these diametrically opposed updates together, the ‘content farm’ elements could be viewed as providing cover for the vertical search targeted elements.”

A Google spokesman has been quoted as explaining, “Quality is obviously a core factor in how highly a site ranks. In search, we’re constantly updating and fine tuning our algorithms to help high-quality publishers get more traffic.

“For some context, last year we tested about 6,000 changes and launched about 500. As you can imagine, with each of these changes some websites will see more traffic and some will see less.”

In case the EC or the US find Google guilty of abusing its power by targeting sites such as Founden, the search engine might be forced to vet its search algorithms with the Ec before implementing them, according to Guardian.

Tags: featured, google panda

Category: Web News