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Google Panda / Farmer update hits the UK

Late last night Google rolled out the Panda / Farmer update in the UK and confirmed the update on their official blog.

The latest update goes further than the original with 14% of queries now affected rather than 12%. They are also taking user data for blocked sites into account which wasn’t directly the case before.

We are seeing big changes for a lot of “how to” queries that we track. Ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com are losing quite a lot of ground but are still ranking in the top 10 for a lot of queries. Interestingly Blogspot blogs and answers.google.com seem to be doing very well from this update, perhaps they are deemed higher quality than other user generated sites?

There is very little data to analyse so far but I will post again over the next few days.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 8:18am ON Tuesday, 12 April 2011

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.rfksolutions.co.uk Robert Kirk

    Hi Patrick

    Are you guys noticing many changes in the SERPS?

    From what I can see from keywords we track, not been huge difference, fingers crossed most of our websites have seen small increase or have stayed the same.

  • Craig Addyman

    “Interestingly Blogspot blogs and answers.google.com seem to be doing very well from this update, perhaps they are deemed higher quality than other user generated sites?”

    Or more bias?

    It will be interesting to see what the data shows us about this over the next few weeks.

  • http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/blog/author/malcolm-slade/ Malcolm Slade

    I am seeing major changes in some SERPs for individual sites (luckily not clients). As to whether this is solely down to being made of Bamboo I can’t 100% say but it did seem to start around Friday afternoon.

    I wrote a deadly serious post on the subject (disclaimer: not at all serious) – http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/blog/panda-watch-update-google-panda-deployed-to-the-uk/

    It is going to be interesting to see what impact it has on e-commerce long tail.

    Regards

    Malc.

    @seomalc

  • http://www.webcritic.co.uk WebCriticUK

    Our clients remain untouched by the change and I actually don’t expect any bad things happening….but it’s early days yet.
    I believe that there will be benefits for those who know how to write and display online content correctly. Patrick’s example is very good if you really know what you are looking at.
    The change should help rid the SERPS and other areas of old style promo copy and print speak.

    I am http://www.webcritic.co.uk or
    http://twitter.com/#!/WebCriticUK

  • http://digisquared.com Daniel

    Like with most changes there will be innocent casualties and wider economic impacts. I have looked at some retail sectors where there has been a clear change in favour of the large established retailers in the SERPs. Can’t wait to see some more analysis on the impact of this.

  • Ryan

    Patrick Altoft, you ignored my last posts on your report of the US Panda update. But I do feel that you have ignored a couple of key points, and you are welcome to respond this time.

    Many privately owned sites and blogs WILL be affected by this probably manual slapdown. Some more than others, and it does of course depend on where they look for backlinks. If your blog or site, irrespective of quality, relied on article directories and revenue sharing sites for high authority backlinks, then you will see authority of those links fall and the subsequent movement in the SERPS.

    In your last article you referenced eHow gains, but failed to point out that eHow had recently floated on the stock market. Or am I being too cynical with that one? If your domains have never touched multi-author sites, either organically or unorganically, then your site will probably not be touched at all. If on the other hand you are competing in niches which were relatively untouched by content farms, but you have been linked to by these authors, then what do you have to gain?

    The UK traffic has collapsed on these places, I should know. So there is no doubt that a lot of people will be seeing positive upwards movement in the SERPS (most of my own sites have). But not all will be moving upwards.

  • http://www.theremoval.com Removals Company

    Hello Patric, it’s true that Ezinearticles and articlesbase are losing quite a lot of ground but are still ranking in the top 10 for a lot of queries. even these sites are not providing allot of facilities to their customers like space or urgent Approval, but anyways these sites are good enough for SEO staff, because we can post our Web & Articles etc on these sites free of cost, so its a very good option for us and i am sure everybody is happy with these services isn’t it?

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Ryan there are loads of sites being hit here from blogs to voucher sites and ecommerce sites. Ehow seems to have been hit in the UK just not the US, yet.

  • Ryan

    Oh, OK, that has surprised me (the eHow slap). That actually makes me happy. I know it sounds strange, from somebody who was taking 4 grand a month from content farms pre-Panda, but I can see the benefits in curtailing the practice.

    I have a lot of income to recover, I’ve gone from wealthy to skint overnight, but it’s back to what I love… having to work hard for the money, and ending up with a saleable web asset. Although knowing a few of the founders of these content farms (in the flesh and skin) I do of course have a great deal of sympathy.

    They all have a lot of cleaning up to do, and than means retrospectively removing tens of thousands of low quality junk, duplicate content, spam, stuff written by ESL students. Will they deserve to be unslapped at that stage? As long as the content quality is there I can’t see the problem. If anything I would sooner the contributors stuck to content farms and left me to pick up the keyword rich domain names, because the death knell to the content farms would only result in hundreds of thousands of new wordpress sites springing up and more people learning how to optimize.

    The content farms may have opened up a few gaps in the SERPS for people to take advantage of in the short term, but I doubt that the competitive advantages will be there in the longer term. I’m sure that I can be forgiven for one small conspiracy theory, it begins with Rupert and ends with Murdoch.

    Sorry for the essay.

  • http://www.outlet-schoenen-online.nl Rick

    I think it is too early to tell what is really going on with the Panda update and I hope it will be released in the rest of the world very soon, so that comparisons and analysis can be made on a broader scale.

  • http://www.discountvouchers.co.uk Doug Scott

    http://www.discountvouchers.co.uk

    We are listed as being hit hard by all the reports but we are seeing no effect in our logfiles.

    Doug

  • http://automatedwebinarguide.com/ Automated Webinar

    Being from the US (and a major article marketer myself), this was a really bad for me when they made the changes here in the states about a month ago. Article directories literally lost all of their relevance within a 24 to 48 hour period. Good luck to the UK online marketers.

  • http://www.roimedia.co.za Cale Pissarra

    I love Blogspot so its good news for me, but I noticed how those sites you mentioned took a hit. Google calls them farms so SEO spammers beware Google is out to get you, content is King

  • http://www.farmerupdate.com Farmer

    That’s interesting about blogspot, but I have quite a few blogspot blogs and haven’t noticed that they are doing better than before, but I will need to look closer at the stats to see if they have dropped as much as non-blogspot blogs. If they are then it will clearly be worth investing more time on them.

  • http://iseoforgoogle.wordpress.com Akash Kumar

    Google’s Panda update has hit many of the content farms and article publishing sites. Atleast panda update is stopping using the same content over and over.

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