Google Farmer Update or Panda Update Rolls Out World wide
On 24th Feb 2011 Google rolled out it's now famous Farmer or Panda Update across US and on 11th April this was extended to all English language Google searches across the world including google.co.in . World over Scraper Sites and Content Farms were badly hit as well as sites which had lots of poor quality content.
Google says that this update impacts 12% of all searches and that it is implemented so that high quality content and sites will move up the Search Engine Results Page and low quality content as well as sites will move down.This change has been done to lower the rankings of Scraper sites and content farms that copy content from other websites and republish on their websites.
It rewards websites that have high quality and unique content which is not present elsewhere.
It has also been found out now that it has also impacted some sites which has internally duplicate content on their websites.
The solution is to either block the indexing of the duplicates or to specify the canonical page by using
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/my-preferred-page.html"/>. Quite a few e-commerce sites have also been impacted as the product descriptions are more or less similar across sites and the content duplication is high.
Google's Views On The Farmer Update
This is what Google had to say on Google Webmaster Central Blog
"Based on our testing, we've found the algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality. If you believe your site is high-quality and has been impacted by this change, we encourage you to evaluate the different aspects of your site extensively. Google's quality guidelines provide helpful information about how to improve your site. As sites change, our algorithmic rankings will update to reflect that. In addition, you're welcome to post in our Webmaster Help Forums. While we aren't making any manual exceptions, we will consider this feedback as we continue to refine our algorithms."
