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What Is Going On With Google Panda Updates?
Google has become the major player in the search pages used by the majority of the Western world. This has placed it in a significant position of power and changes lately make you wonder if that power is beginning to be missused, intentionally or otherwse. Since the first Panda updates back in the Spring websites have been hit left right and center. In many cases these are decent websites that desreve to appear in a decnt ranked position in the search results but good sites have been almost wiped out by the changes Google has made.
It is hard to see what the benefits are. There are many reports of scraped and copied content appearing in a much higher ranked position than the original authors content. It makes no sense.
The search engiines claim to always be looking for the most rellevent results for their customers and, I guess, for other reasons sometimes the copied content looks better to them. With a few additional keywords sprinkled around the page like fairy dust a copied article may seem to be a better result to the search engine bots. It is totally unfair on the original author though and arguably providing a less impressive website for the search engine user to visit.
Many people would claim that the whole debacle of the Panda updates has been a disaster for Google, for their customers and for the website owners who put a lot of effort into producing decent articles and information for their website visitors.
Hubpages is an example of a good site that has thousands of users who publish articles on the website and in exchange get a percentage of any advertising payments. There are a large number of excellent authors providing very good quality content. There are thousands of well researched and well written articles that any visitor would be delighted to discover and read.
The first Panda update decimated the traffic to the hubpages website. The further updates, and there have been several, have done little to help Googles users find the good quality sites that exist on Hubpages website. The reverse is true.
The owners of the Hubpages website have taken all sorts of steps to try to clean out any poor quality hubs. They have stopped people linking to anything that might be seen as poor quality site. The restricted sites include such established players as clickbank presumably due to the large numbers of make money today schemes offered there alongside the good quality ebooks, videos and CDs.
A recent move to using subdomains on Hubpages appeared to have turned things around but in the last week or so many of the good quality hubpages have disappeared from the search engine results. Who knows what the reason is this time. It may be that since the subdomains have all suddenly appeared Google have sandboxed them for a few months thinking their sudden appearanc is suspicious.
Who knows what is going on in the great google mind in the sky. Whatever their intentions when they introduced the Panda updates it seems that the effects have been a disaster for their search results and for thousands, and perhaps millions, of enthusiastic authors of webpages and articles all over the world.
It is depressing to find that putting the effort in to writing good quality articles is wasted. Google does not appear to want quality. Their robotic analysis appears to favor junk over quality. It is so disheartening to find that thanks to a damn computer the common sense decisions of what is good or not has been turned on its head. No longer is quality a good thing. Rubbish is now better just so long as it has the features that the google robots are looking for. It could be complete jibberish but that would not seem to matter in the eyes of Google.
None of us knows for sure what it is that causes Google to rate one page higher than another. It may be that the pages with videos from Youtube get a better ranking because Google owns youtube. It could be the number of keywords or the variety of similar keywords. Perhaps it is down to the percentage of keywords compared to the number of words on a page. We simply don't know but in my opinion, at the moment, Google is not doing a very good job for their customers. Maybe having poor search engine results means they get more adwords clicks on the search pages.
There are businesses that provided a perfectly good service for their visitors who have been decimated by these changes and many decent poeple are suffering thanks to Google and its whims. Such irresponsibility is to be expected. Google is a private company. They have no duty the the world other than their shareholders and it may be the changes have been very profitable but it has made the internet a less useful place for the users and has made producing good quality content a waste of time for website owners and authors. Let us hope that for the good of the internet Google changes their direction and begins to put quality first before we all disappear in a swamp of poor quality webpages that the intoduction of Adsense started.
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