Pandas may be universally beloved by adults and children everywhere, but webmasters of most article publishing sites are ready to pull out the shotguns when it comes to the Google version. At the end of September, the search giant unveiled the latest iteration of its infamous algorithm known as Panda \/ Farmer, and the groans of \u201chere we go again\u201d echoed through cyberspace. Google downplayed the update as just one of approximately 500 changes they make to their ranking algorithms each year, but it is obvious that some modifications have a greater impact than others, and the late September change crippled some major sites all over again.<\/p>\n
Editorial quality seems to be a prime driving factor of the Panda \/ Farmer structure, but how Google\u2019s algorithm determines what is quality and what is not is infuriatingly obfuscated on purpose by Google Guru Matt Cutts and friends to prevent the less ethical from gaming the system. A heavily spun article is going to wave a huge red flag in front of the Google bots, but other aspects are not as clear. Google does not seem to favor proper spelling and grammar over borderline illiteracy, and it is not unheard of for a snake-oil hard-sell affiliate site to outrank the content on an informative institutional website for the same subject matter. Some wags have claimed that Panda \/ Farmer is a bit like going to go play a new game in Vegas where the rules are kept hidden and you just play until you win or lose\u2026 without really knowing why.<\/p>\n
The SERP wars are starting to resemble Middle Ages warfare where one army would make incursions onto enemy territory only to be fought back and then make more incursions and be pushed back again. Nowhere is this oscillation more evident than in hubpages.com\u2019s well publicized arm wrestle with Google\u2019s Panda \/ Farmer algorithm updates. Hubpages was one of the most heavily penalized article publishing sites and saw its traffic drop precipitously until it fought back by giving each of their thousands of writers their own subdomains: writerxyz.hubpages.com. Google started indexing those subdomains independently and the SERPs zoomed upwards. In the last few weeks Google seems to have caught on to the shift and traffic is trending down again. Hubpages and the other article sites are certain to fire back with some innovation or another to regain the lost numbers and Google is just as certain to amend its algorithms for the zillionth time to knock them down again. So the online version of The Hundred Years\u2019 War continues.<\/p>\n
Is an otherwise valid, original and informative article on squidoo.com, associatedcontent.com or any of the other major publishing sites to be penalized because it appears on the same website as Bollywood\u2019s Sariest Desi Girls, or How To Hack Into The Pentagon? That is a question that the webmasters of these sites keep asking themselves and no clear answer from Google has been upcoming.<\/p>\n