The Guardian did a nice write up on the UK version of the Panda update, and I’m not going to rehash their work. They use winners and losers data from elevatelocal.co.uk – I’m not sure about them as a source, but the information looks similar and comparable to what Sistrix produced for the Feb 24th Panda on Google.com.
What I am going to point out is this:
- The US update did not manage to harm ehow – the most famous of Demand Media’s content farm sites – this is probably primarily because their advertising policy is a bit more user-friendly than many content farms.
- The UK update did impact ehow.com and ehow.co.uk
- In the Google blog linked to previously, they mention that they incorporated the Chrome user data in the algorithm for the UK (in the US version, they merely tracked and correlated the data, they did not use it specifically. This time they used it.)
I think it’s interesting that they are incorporating Chrome user data, and I’m betting that’s how eHow got picked out this time through.
Unfortunately, using Chrome data as an input for the search algorithm does smack of a way to bludgeon competitors. Of course, they want to use as many human ndicators of quality results as possible, but humans will always play games, won’t we?
I was wondering how they would sift through search results in international traffic. My guess is the multilingual stuff is even harder to sift through for quality, and that that user data a more reliable indicator than many others.
What do you think?
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