As most of you would be aware, Google effected the latest change at the end of February in the US, widening its scope now, to roll it out on a broader scale. The resultant downgrading effects were calculated by a search agency that compared where the websites surfaced in searches for specific keywords prior to the update and after it.
Sites that gain and lose from ‘Panda’ update
The Google official blog post mentions of the change first unveiled February:
“We are excited about this new ranking improvement since we believe it is a big step in the right direction of helping people to find ever higher quality in our results. We have been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.”
The algorithmic improvement is designed to help users find more quality websites in their search. Since then Google claims to have received positive response about the updates, as searchers are getting better results, and leading publishers are drawing more traffic. The update incorporates new user feedback signals to help people get enhanced search results.
Many high profiles sites likely to vanish from the Google search
A host of voucher & discount websites have been hit by the enormous changes, and so have sites like Mahalo and Ehow. Among the other most popular sites, which have seemingly been hit are About.com and myvouchercodes.co.uk. Certain sites like Pocket Lint have been penalized for having used redirection technique on affiliate links something that Google tends to view rather negatively. Among the winners are those Web-based platforms where users spend time going through pages, such as Techcrunch, This is Money finance site, Ebay UK etc.
Many such high profiles sites will nearly vanish from the search results after the downgrading. On the other hand, a handful of sites, such as the video site Vimeo and YouTube (incidentally owned by Google), as well as select technology sites like Mashable and Techcrunch are likely to get a boost.
The update risks inviting the ire of not only Microsoft but also the European Commission, since it demotes Ciao that has complained to the EC that Google was leveraging its monopoly in an unfair way. This has sparked off an EC investigation..