The Real Panda Update

Google officially announced the roll out of the Panda/farmer update to all English language users, and they claim to have had many positive responses as a result. According to Google, an additional 2% of queries will be affected with this new update that looks deeper into content that targets long tail searches.

There have been numerous complaints, on forums and the like, talking about scraped content appearing higher than the original source, which of course is immensely frustrating for many hard-working authors out there. This ought to be addressed as it’s a matter of fairness. According to the Search Engine Round Table blog, Google has started to incorporate user data about specific blocked sites. This is used as a secondary method of ranking sites with low quality content.
What to do? Well, as Google’s been saying for years now, the best method is to focus on the user: create content that’s not only as high quality as possible, but also helpful and useful for the searcher. Black hats using cheap tricks are hopefully a thing of the past and let’s look forward to better quality results from Google!