Google’s Kaspar Szymanski wrote a Google+ update yesterday afternoon, “Here’s the uber long thread on #Google webmaster help forum; if you think your legitimate, original content site has been affected by our #Panda update please feel free to let us know and tune in. We also have escalation forums where webmasters can escalate non-English sites in order to help us fine tune recent algorithms.
Szymanski is a “Google web spam fighter,” who says his occupation is “hunting web spam in Google search results and spearheading Google’s webmaster outreach efforts.
The thread is here, and it is long indeed. 163 pages long.
Google is indeed watching it though. Google’s John Mueller responded to a Barry Schwartz post when he suggested that it might be easy for Google to miss a post in such a long thread. Mueller wrote, “It’s certainly easier to follow a single thread than to follow lots of threads spread out across the web. Even if not all of the issues have the same cause, it makes it easier to track them, and pass possible issues on where appropriate.”
“If we follow as they get posted, we don’t have to go through the previous posts,” he said. “I subscribe to threads like these via email, it makes it easier to focus on the new posts, do a preliminary diagnosis and forward things where appropriate.” He later added that he sees it more as a feed than a discussion thread.
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On a semi-related note, I ran across this video being shared on Google+. It doesn’t have anything to do with Google, but it has a Panda doing mean things, so I thought it seemed worth passing on.