Google Webmaster Central tweeted out a new Matt Cutts video today, discussing the Panda update and scrapers. The specific question addressed is: “I understand that the recent farmer update (Panda) gives a penalty for poor content. Given the penalty scrapers have been outranking original sites. Should webmasters spend time in fighting scrapers directly or work on the poor content?”
“My advice would be to really concentrate on the quality of your own site,” says Cutts. “It is the case that sometimes scrapers can be returned in Google search results, despite our best efforts. And it is the case that sometimes you see scrapers more or less often, but it’s also the case that Google has been working on trying to find and fix the problems related to scrapers.”
“We’ve got engineers working on that,” he says. “They’re going to keep working on that. We’ve actually got some good stuff in the pipeline that I’m pretty excited about.”
Now, it’s worth noting that the actual upload date of this video is August 8, though it was not released as a new video until today.
@googlewmc
WMXNew webmaster video: Should I spend more time on improving my content or on fighting scrapers? http://t.co/naZeRPGW
1 hour ago via web · powered by @socialditto
On August 26, Cutts tweeted:
@mattcutts
Matt CuttsScrapers getting you down? Tell us about blog scrapers you see: http://t.co/6HPhROS We need datapoints for testing. 95 days ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto
“So we’ll keep working on the scraper side of things,” Cutts says in the video. “My advice for people who may have been affected by the ‘Farmer’ or the ‘Panda’ update is to concentrate primarily more on the quality side – the content side – thinking about how can you either improve the quality of the content if there’s some part of your site that’s got especially low quality content or stuff that was really not all that useful, then it might make sense to not have that content on your site. Things along those lines.”
“So if you think about it, the fundamental problem, if you’re affected by this particular algorithm update, is that Google is thinking that your site is not providing as high quality content as some other sites,” he says. “So the best thing to do is to concentrate on the root of the issue. To concentrate on trying to make sure that you have the highest quality content so that Google sees that and can assess that, and then you don’t have to worry nearly as much about the scrapers, because you’re doing much better.”
