Son of A Google Panda

To say that Google has had an eventful year may be an understatement. First, there was the announcement that the search engine had pulled in 1 billion unique users globally for the first time ever during the month of May. Impressive for sure, and roughly 15% of the world’s total population to boot.

Then there was the small matter of the beginning of a long-anticipated US antitrust investigation into the global search goliath. The investigation will focus on determining whether Google has abused its dominant position as the Internet’s most used search engine. One of the key allegations against it is that it routinely manipulates its search results to favour its own websites and subsidiaries, such as YouTube. Google has vehemently denied all such claims.

Finally, the search engine’s own pet panda has come of age and given birth to the Panda 2.2 update. Earlier in the month, Google engineer and figurehead Matt Cutts told Seattle’s Search Market Expo that there were a great many changes still to come, saying to those assembled “Don’t consider it finished…” and telling them that Google will continue to make changes to Panda until at least the end of 2011.

Google confirms Panda 2.2 roll-out

Since going live in the US in February and in the UK and elsewhere in April, the Panda Update has remained a hot topic amongst online marketers, SEO professionals and webmasters. The update, the most dramatic alteration of Google’s ranking algorithms for some time, was broadly intended to put the focus on quality content, and in Matt Cutts’ words, “reduce rankings for low quality sites [that] copy content from other websites or… are just not very useful.”

But there has been much criticism of the game-changing update, as it emerged that a number of legitimate and widely-respected sites, including Microsoft’s Ciao, had suffered significant drops in visibility and rankings following the update.

The search engine has been uncharacteristically quiet about this new update compared to the original update, but it confirmed the change after many site owners noticed renewed fluctuations in their appearance in search results. The intention of this latest update is widely thought to be to improve the search engine’s detection of ‘scraper sites’ and link farming SEO techniques. Whether this will have a positive impact on sites that feel they were wrongly punished by the original update is not yet known.