Have you seen effects from Google’s most recent algorithm changes? Let us know in the comments.

Some have apparently already been feeling the effects of Google’s algorithmic early this year. Webmasters were quick to point the finger at the old panda, but Google assures us that this is not the case. A spokesperson for the company told WebProNews there have been no Panda updates in 2012 so far (though I’d expect one to launch before too long).

By the way, now that 2011 is over, do you think Panda has done a good job at cleaning up search results?

In the latest edition of the series, on the company’s Inside Search Blog, they highlight 21 changes made in the month of December. The list goes as follows:

• Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.
• More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.
• Soft 404 Detection. Web servers generally return the 404 status code when someone requests a page that doesn’t exist. However, some sites are configured to return other status codes, even though the page content might explain that the page was not found. We call these soft 404s (or “crypto” 404s) and they can be problematic for search engines because we aren’t sure if we should ignore the pages. This change is an improvement to how we detect soft 404s, especially in Russian, German and Spanish. For all you webmasters out there, the best practice is still to always use the correct response code.
• More accurate country-restricted searches. [launch codename “greencr”] On domains other than .com, users have the option to see only results from their particular country. This is a new algorithm that uses several signals to better determine where web documents are from, improving the accuracy of this feature.
• More rich snippets. We improved our process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets. As a result, you should start seeing more sites with rich snippets in search results.
• Better infrastructure for autocomplete. This is an infrastructure change to improve how our autocomplete algorithm handles spelling corrections for query prefixes (the beginning part of a search).
• Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.
• Google Instant enhancements for Japanese. For languages that use non-Latin characters, many users use a special IME (Input Method Editor) to enter queries. This change works with browsers that are IME-aware to better handle Japanese queries in Google Instant.
• More accurate byline dates. [launch codename “foby”] We made a few improvements to how we determine what date to associate with a document. As a result, you’ll see more accurate dates annotating search results.
• Live results for NFL and college football. [project codename “Live Results”] We’ve added new live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results. These results now provide the latest scores, schedules and standings for your favorite football teams.
• Improved dataset for related queries. We are now using an improved dataset on term relationships to find related queries. We sometimes include results for queries that are related to your original search, and this improvement leads to results from more relevant related queries.
• Related query improvements. [launch codename “lyndsy”] Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are related to the original query but have fewer words. We made several changes to our algorithms to make them more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.
• Better lyrics results. [launch codename “baschi”, project codename “Contra”] This change improves our result quality for lyrics searches.
• Tweak to +1 button on results page. As part of our continued effort to deliver a beautifully simple user experience across Google products, we’ve made a subtle tweak to how the +1 button appears on the results page. Now the +1 button will only appear when you hover over a result or when the result has already been +1’d.
• Better spell correction in Vietnamese. [project codename “Pho Viet”] We launched a new Vietnamese spelling model. This will help give more accurate spelling predictions for Vietnamese queries.
• Upcoming events at venues. We’ve improved the recently released places panel for event venues. For major venues, we now show up to three upcoming events on the right of the page. Try it for [staples center los angeles] or [paradise rock club boston].
• Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.
• Improved Hebrew synonyms. [launch codename “SweatNovember”, project codename “Synonyms”] This update refines how we handle Hebrew synonyms across multiple languages. Context matters a lot for translation, so this change prevents us from using translated synonyms that are not actually relevant to the query context.
• Safer searching. [launch codename “Hoengg”, project codename "SafeSearch"] We updated our SafeSearch tool to provide better filtering for certain queries when strict SafeSearch is enabled.
• Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.uk, https://www.google.de andhttps://www.google.fr.
• Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.

The image search landing page quality signal change is quite interesting. We ran a great article on optimizing for image search by Michael Gray last year, and that’s full of tips to consider for this less talked about element of SEO, but the adjustments, as unspecific as they may be, reflect Google’s Panda-style focus on quality in search results. This, to me, is saying they’re applying same kind of thinking they do with regular web search to other parts of Google, more than ever before.

Here’s the list of questions Google has presented in the past to consider asking yourself, when evaluating quality.

Note that “better spam detection for image search” is also on the list.

Also note the codenames used throughout the list. Most you probably won’t have to remember like Panda and Caffeine, but it’s still nice to have something to reference for the future.

With regards to the “more rich snippets” item on the list, you may want to check out the series of videos Google recently put out on how to do rich snippets.

Which changes do you think are the most significant? Is your site being helped or hurt by changes? Let us know in the comments.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land acquired a statement from Google, which says:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Later, Google’s Matt Cutts jumped on Google+, while trying to take a “digital break” for a holiday in Central America. I his post, he said:

I’ll give the short summary, then I’ll describe the webspam team’s response. Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

Other Googlers have responded to Matt’s explanation on Google+. Here are a few of the responses:

Jason Morrison:

Great explanation from +Matt Cutts. This is embarrassing, but a good illustration of two things:

2. Why you should pay attention to what any marketing, advertising, or SEO companies might be doing on your behalf.

Obi Felten:

Was mortified yesterday to read Danny Sullivan’s story, and sad that he thought we were paying bloggers to promote our Chrome films in such a crude and horrible way. Having been in Google marketing for over 5 years I can testify that we don’t do advertorial or pay bloggers! It’s one of the things that makes me love my job here, we let the products speak for themselves and don’t overpromise. So this was pretty shocking. It was a media buy that went very wrong, we never agreed to do anything else than paid video ads – but clearly we need to be more on top of our media buys. As Matt explains in his post we’ve demoted the Chrome page in the search rankings in response.

Marcus Foster:

This is the kind of integrity and transparency that makes me proud to work at Google. Show me another company that would have acted in this way.

James Bogosian:

This was the right thing to do. Glad to see we did it.

Of course, the whole search quality aspect wasn’t discussed in Matt’s post. One of the posts from the Chrome campaign, which I referenced in another piece, which has pretty “thin” content, is still ranking for “chrome small business benefits”.

I don’t think Chrome losing its PageRank will help quality there, though it is still at the top of the page, via AdWords.

I don’t think everyone would agree that they’ve all been improvements, as we see complaints about this every day, but Google makes a lot of changes aimed at improving search results, nevertheless.

“There are almost always a set of motivating searches, and these searches are not performing as well as we’d like,” says Engineering Director Scott Huffman. “Ranking engineers then come up with a hypothesis about what signal, what data could we integrate into our algorithm.”

The video does provide some unique behind the scenes footage of Google engineers plugging away on their computers, presumably working on the algorithms.

Google briefly talks about the process of raters. “These are external people that have been trained to judge whether one ranking is more relevant and higher quality than another,” says software engineer Mark Paskin.

“We show these raters a side-by-side for queries that the engineer’s experiment might be affecting,” explains Google Search Scientist Rajan Patel. “We also confirm these changes with live experiments on real users.”

“We do this in something called a sandbox. We send a very small fraction of actual Google traffic to the sandbox. We compute lots of different metrics,” says Paskin.

“In 2010, we ran over 20,000 different experiments. All the data from the human evaluation and the live experiment are then rolled out by a search analyst,” says Huffman.

Sangeeta Das, a quantitative analyst says, “For each project, it’s usually one analyst assigned from the moment that we’re talking to the engineers, trying to learn about their change.”

“We then have a launch decision meeting where the leadership of the search team then looks at that data and makes a decision,” says Huffman.

“Ultimately, the goal of the search eval analyst team is to provide informed, data-driven decision, and present an unbiased view” says Das.

“If our scientific testing says this is a good idea for Google users, we will launch it on Google,” says Google Fellow Amit Signhal.

The video then looks at the “did you mean” and “showing results for” features as an example.

“Yes, we’re looking for help improving Google search—but this time we’re not asking you to submit more spam reports,” writes Kaspar Szymanski of Google’s Search Quality team. “Although we still appreciate receiving quality spam reports, today we’ve got a different opportunity for you to improve Google Search: how about YOU join our team and do the webspam fighting yourself?”

Earlier this month, Google launched what it called “the biggest refresh in 10 years” to its spam report form. We looked at this more closely here.

It’s worth noting that the job is in Dublin. Szymanski posted the above image, saying that it’s an actual work environment photo taken at the Dublin office.

“Here’s what we’re looking for: open-minded academic graduates willing to work in a multinational environment in our Dublin office,” says Szymanski. “Looking at a site’s source code should not scare you. You should be excited about search engines and the Internet. It’s also essential that you share our aversion to webspam and the drive to make high-quality content accessible. PlayStation or foosball skills are a plus.

So what does Google look for in a spam fighter (or “Search Quality Associate”) exactly?

The requirements are listed as:

• Review assigned sites for quality and content.
• Improve the quality of Google’s search results by evaluating websites to identify areas of concern and interest.
• Cooperate with engineering teams to improve our search quality.
• Develop and share practices for search quality investigation and analysis.
• Investigate and analyze search quality issues in Google’s European indexes.

“As a Search Quality Associate, you have the opportunity to make a significant and direct impact on the quality of Google’s search results through search quality evaluation,” Google says. “You will be working on the cutting edge of search and the forefront of the web ensuring quality information is provided to millions of internet users, and you will be expected to keep pace with constant change in a fast-paced work environment, bringing innovative ideas to improve access to relevant information on the web. You are a web-savvy individual who is a take-charge team player, as well as a quick learner and strongly interested in providing a better search experience for Google users.”

The position requires he candidate to review assigned sites for quality and content and improve the quality of search results by evaluating sites “to identify areas of concern and interest.”

This is the whole reason the Panda update exists. It’s all about improving the quality of results. Some will dispute the success of that, but it is the reason for better or for worse.

But what about Bing? It doesn’t command nearly the search market share that Google does, but as it powers Yahoo search, it’s really the only major competitor in town.

Bing talked a bit about its own views on content quality this week, and content producers might do well to check take notice of that as well – especially those who may have been hit by the Panda update, but are still doing ok in Bing.

Whereas Google had a list of questions one could ask themselves to asses the quality of their site, Bing has published a list of things to avoid, which reads as follows:

• Duplicate content – don’t use articles or content that appears in other places.  Produce your own unique content.
• Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages.  Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.
• All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page.  Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.
• Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.
• Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment.  Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.
• Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading.  Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently?  Remove them.  Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.
• Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable.  Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances.  It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load.  Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.
• Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page.  Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages.  Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.
• Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable.  Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page.  Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.

The rest of Bing’s advice basically boils down to focusing on creating a good user experience and letting Bing know about your content. “Whether you call them rich snippets or by their proper names, the act of marking up your content to tell the engines more details about the content is a wise investment,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester. ”By following the plan outlined at Schema.org, you can embed meta tags around your content. Visitors won’t see them, but the search engines will, enabling us to understand your content and use it in unique ways to create more engaging search experiences.  Take some time and review this idea to see if you can leverage the great content you’re creating in new ways.”

If you’re living up to Google’s definition of quality, you probably won’t be doing too bad in Bing either, and if you’re doing well in Google, you’re probably getting a lot more search referrals from Google than you could ever get from Bing anyway, but it’s still helpful to get a look into Bing’s own thinking on this issue.

“Zorro is a major upgrade in our relevance,” Skrenta tells WebProNews. ”blekko users have spent the past six months curating the web on category by category basis, telling us the best sites for broad categories like health and personal finance as well as narrower categories like gluten free.”

“Zorro incorporates those human-curation efforts into our result set for non-slashtag queries by boosting pages from the curated sites – even for non-slashtag queries,” he adds. ”With Zorro, we can boost results from multiple slashtags to make results better. ex.: https://blekko.com/ws/pregnancy+tips”

“The net result is further reduction of spam,” he says.

On how the Zorro update improves the search experience compared to competitors, Skrenta tells us, “Other search sites rely wholly on algorithmic intelligence for results. We are incorporating human-curation efforts directly into our results. Given the amount of SEO gaming being done, we believe that only humans can accurately differentiate a clever spam site from a quality site.”

“We initially integrated slashtags for 10 sites into our standard results,” he says. ”Now we are incorporating hundreds.  Our users have created over 100k slashtags since we launched.  That data wasn’t available on day 1.”

Blekko’s mission is to provide search results without spam. That takes a lot of filtering. There is a discussion going on around the web right now about how what we see on the web is becoming more and more filtered. Eli Pariser calls it the “Filter Bubble,” and DuckDuckGo, another alternative search engine and peer of blekko’s launched a site discussing this very topic. This is more about search engines and other sites (including social networks like Facebook) filtering what we see by tailoring content delivered to us on a personalized level. A lot of people don’t like the idea of having this content filtered. With blekko doing its own kind of filtering, we wondered what Skrenta might have to say about this.

“We’ve reached a tipping point on the web where it is easier to white list the set of good sites than black-list the set of bad sites,” he tells us.  “ex. the top 100 health sites will answer all your health questions.  You don’t want to search outside that set of sites.  Our efforts with Zorro combine the best of curation and algorithmic intelligence to deliver spam free results.”

Blekko somewhat famously (at least within the search industry) blocked a number of sites deemed “content farms” from its results. Even today, blekko’s home page carries the message: “Slashing out…spam…content farms…malware.” Among the sites blocked were a few from Demand Media, including eHow, which has consistently carried the “content farm” label, despite the company’s best efforts to position it in a different light.

Demand Media has made it a point to clean up eHow’s quality (more on this initiative here), so we wondered if blekko’s banning of eHow, or any site, can be reversed. “We constantly review sites for quality and our users continually identify quality sites for us,” Skrenta says.

Along with the Zorro update, blekko launched a little game called “3 Engine Monte“. It’s available via a link on blekko’s home page, and invites users to enter a query and then choose from a set of three results sets, which one they like the best. One is from Google, one is from Bing, and the other is of course from blekko.

We asked if the majority are picking blekko most often. “We are currently collecting data and will have results soon,” Skrenta tells us.

When asked about long-term goals for blekko, Skrenta simply says, “Clean up the web from spam, category by category.”

On the new results pages, users will see sites that others have hand-picked to be included in one or more slashtags. So far, users have created over 100,000 of them. The company considers this a human site review element to the “war on spam.” The slashtags appear at the top of the search results, and for each site boosted by the slashtag, next to its URL.

“Millions of users and hundreds of millions of searches have given us insight into what is truly great quality content on the Web and what is poor quality spam,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “This new version of blekko bakes in that intelligence in every search so the spam gets weeded out and the best content comes to the top in every search.”

In addition to that, search results will display sites’ logos. Blekko says this is so users can “quickly choose results from trusted brands that offer the best content.”

Though stumbling a bit in some months, Blekko has continued to grow since its launch. Compete has Blekko.com at 211k unique visitors in the U.S. last month, after launching last fall.

Finally, the Zorro update comes with a “new relevance model for ranking.” This includes “a ramped up adspam algorithm, identifying millions more pages on the Web that contain multiple ads and little content.” Such pages, Blekko says, have been permanently elminated from the index so they’ll never appear in search results.

Blekko is so confident in its search quality, it has also introduced a little game called 3 Engine Monte, which lets you enter a query and see three different sets of results. One comes from Blekko, and the others from Google and Bing. The user’s job is to pick which one they like best, and they think users are apt to pick Blekko fairly frequently, I’m assuming.

3 Engine Monte doesn’t appear to take into account various kinds of search results offered in the other engines through Universal search. For example, if I search for “mexican food” it doesn’t show me all of the local stuff and the images that Google actually shows me if I go to Google and perform the search. As far as the purse “ten blue links” type results, I’ll give Blekko credit for offering better ones (and Bing as well for that matter) in some instances that I tried.

Interestingly, it does show you which results in the competitors’ results that it has banned. The game can be accessed from the home page of Blekko.

Google says its users in kazakhstan may see a decrease in search quality, but that the company does not want to contribute to a fractured Internet. Here is the entire explanation from Google SVP, Research & Systems Infrastructure, Bill Coughan, as posted on the official Google Blog:

The genius of the Internet has always been its open infrastructure, which allows anyone with a connection to communicate with anyone else on the network. It’s not limited by national boundaries, and it facilitates free expression, commerce and innovation in ways that we could never have imagined even 20 or 30 years ago.

Some governments, however, are attempting to create borders on the web without full consideration of the consequences their actions may have on their own citizens and the economy. Last month, the Kazakhstan Network Information Centre notified us of an order issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information in Kazakhstan that requires all .kz domain names, such as google.kz, to operate on physical servers within the borders of that country. This requirement means that Google would have to route all searches on google.kzto servers located inside Kazakhstan. (Currently, when users search on any of our domains, our systems automatically handle those requests the fastest way possible, regardless of national boundaries.)

We find ourselves in a difficult situation: creating borders on the web raises important questions for us not only about network efficiency but also about user privacy and free expression. If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet. So we have decided to redirect users that visit google.kz to google.com in Kazakh. Unfortunately, this means that Kazakhstani users will experience a reduction in search quality as results will no longer be customized for Kazakhstan.

Measures that force Internet companies to choose between taking actions that harm the open web, or reducing the quality of their services, hurt users. We encourage governments and other stakeholders to work together to preserve an open Internet, which empowers local users, boosts local economies and encourages innovation around the globe.

It’s not that surprising that Google would make such a move, as the company has promoted an “open” web consistently for years, and after the ordeal with China, they made it clear that they’re not above pulling out of a country, and frankly, China is a much bigger economy than Kazakhstan.

Still, it is interesting that this comes at the sacrifice of search quality, and that Google is openly pointing this out, at a time when Google’s search quality has been heavily criticized and iterated upon relentlessly by the company, with recent algorithm updates.

So here is a list of our articles related to the Panda update, content farms, and search quality from the past several months (updated continuously).

Despite New Panda Guidelines, Google Still Burying Authoritative Results
Panda Update Already Happened. Not Every Google Tweak Is Still Panda.
What Would Google Search Quality Be Like Without AdSense?
Helium Raises $10 Million After Being Victimized by Google Panda Update
Don’t Expect a Lot of eHow Content to Be Removed from YouTube
Google Panda Update: New Advice Directly From Google
Google Competitive Practices Brought Into the Panda Conversation
Demand Media Announces 20% Decline in eHow Search Referrals Due to Panda
Demand Media Earnings Report – Revenue Up, Questions Remain
Demand Media Deletes eHow Articles, Edits Others in Quality Clean-up Initiative
Google Algorithm Update – Is Bounce Rate a Ranking Signal?
Demand Media Search Data Released Ahead of Earnings Call
Google Panda Update – Webmasters Still Trying to Crack the Code
eHow Getting Serious About Quality
Mashable Affected By Google’s Panda Update? Not Likely.
Google Panda Update – A Broader View of U.S. Traffic Patterns
Panda Reference in Google Earth Day Doodle
Google Panda Update Victim HubPages Tweaks Approach to Boost Search Visibility
Panda Update: HubPages Asks Google Why YouTube Gets Away With Softer Content Policy
Google Panda Update Helps Local Search Results
Google Algorithm Update Fallout, eHow Response
Google Panda Update Winners, Losers, and Future Considerations
EzineArticles Hit By Google Panda Update Again
Google Panda Update Hits Demand Media’s eHow This Time
Google Panda Update Benefits Google Properties
Ranking in Google Now That Panda Has Gone Global
Google Panda Update Winners: Video, News, Blogs, and Porn
Google Panda Update Victim Xomba Loses AdSense Ads Too
Google Panda Update Officially Goes Global (In English)
Google Panda Update Launched in More Countries
Google Panda Update – Made for Big Brands?
Google Does Guest Post for Panda Victim HubPages
Examiner’s Approach to Content Quality Post Panda Update
MerchantCircle Goes From Panda Victim to Blekko Curator
EzineArticles Tells Authors How to Get Accepted Post Panda
Google Panda Update Hit E-Commerce Sites Too
Google’s Algorithm Impact Over the Years in Graphic Detail
Why Panda is the New Coke
EzineArticles Traffic Update Post Panda
Google Panda Update: Lack of Consistency on Quality?
Google Panda Update Still Encouraging Higher Quality
Suite101 CEO Writes Open Letter to Google’s Matt Cutts
Google “Panda” Algorithm Update – What’s Known & What’s Possible
Calacanis on Google Algorithm Aftermath and Impact on Mahalo
Google Algorithm Update to Get “New Layer” to Help “Falsely Caught” Sites
EzineArticles Aims to Get Rankings Back, Following Google Algorithm Update
Did Google’s Algorithm Update Go Far Enough on Content Farms?
Is This Google Algorithm Change About Content Farms or Not?
Quora vs. eHow: Where’s the Better Quality?
Decreasing Google Dependence: A Growing Trend
Demand Media Redesigns eHow with Quality Control Feature
Will Google Fill In Its Own Search Gaps, Demand Media-Style?
Retrevo Says Google Update Pushed Bigger Brands Up
AdSense and Its Relationship to Search Rankings
Google Algorithm Update Casualties Speak
Google Update Costs Mahalo Employees Their Jobs
Google Algorithm Update Helps (Not Hurts) eHow
Google Finally Cracks Down on Content Farms
Demand Media Responds to Google Content Farm Update
Demand Media Goes on the Defensive About Content Quality
Content Marketer or Content Farm?
If Google Tweaked Its Search Results …
An Inside Look at wikiHow Content Quality Control
User Feedback: The Next Google Ranking Signal?
Why It’s Easier for a Startup (Than For Google) to Take Action on Content Farms
wikiHow On Why Wikis Deliver Higher Quality Than Content Farms
DuckDuckGo Follows Content Farm Banning With Promoting wikiHow Content
Blekko Queries on the Rise, More So Since Content Farm Blocking
What If Content From One Company Dominated Google’s Search Results?
Confirmation: The Google Algorithm Change Was Not for Content Farms
Blekko Bans eHow and Other Content Farms
Demand Media CEO: Google Not Talking About Us
Google, Bing, and Blekko Talk Content Farms and Search Quality
The Real Problem With Content Farms is Google

Nobody said we’re done yet either. We’ll update the article as new developments, insights, and research occur.

Meanwhile, we might as well use the comments section to expand the article as a useful resource. If you have any of your own Panda-related stories or insights, please don’t hesitate to share them with the rest of us.

That’s not to say that simply using AdSense will get you penalized. Of course Google doesn’t want that. It makes money from these ads, but it is interesting to see how AdSense publishers of all kinds have been impacted by the update.

One can’t help but wonder what Google’s search results would look like if sites using AdSense ads were removed. Would the quality be better? Maybe. Maybe not. It would be interesting to see either way. Obviously that will never happen, unless Google one day pulls the plug on AdSense, which is also highly unlikely.

Google recently released a list of questions “that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article,” in light of the Panda update. How many sites do you come across regularly that meet all of these criteria and run Google AdSense ads? To recap, here’s the full list:

It is certainly possible to have a “quality” site and use AdSense ads. There are plenty of examples out there, but is that the norm?

Interestingly enough, Google is reportedly turning away some advertisers that were hit by the Panda update from advertising with AdWords. Aaron Wall of SEOBook tells an interesting story about a guy this has happened to. Here’s the situation as Wall presents it (pulling no punches):

That’s not everybody’s experience, but it’s also not the only such complaint we’ve seen. It’s not hard to find a similar analysis in any webmaster forum or comment section on a related article.

We reported before, that another Panda victim, Xomba, had its AdSense ads completely removed following a bogus takedown notice, though Google did restore them shortly thereafter.

For another Panda victim – HubPages, a Googler went so far as to write a guest post on the company blog telling writers how to produce better content for AdSense. Granted, that was before the global roll-out of the update.

One thing regarding Panda and AdSense seems pretty clear. Don’t overdo it on the ads. Don’t “have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content.”

[Image credit: kawanet]