So, the moment the UK SEO community has been waiting for with bated breath has happened. Google’s Panda update (known as Farmer before the official internal Google name was made known) has now rolled out to the UK.
The official announcement of this was seen by many as a result of a Tweet from Matt Cutts, and was widely spread:
The goal of this update is to help folks find higher quality sites in their search results, and not just results filled with spammy, made for AdSense or full of advertising websites with low level, low value and often duplicated content.
There have been reports of sites that don’t precisely meet that criteria, having suffered a month or two ago when this rolled out in the US, also suffering, and we will of course be keeping a close eye on all of the niche’s we operate in to see the impact.
Google have also announced that they will be incorporating some data from their “site blocking” elements within search – using user data to help them determine websites that they just frankly don’t want to see. How easily this sort of system can be gamed is yet to be seen in full, but it does strike SEO’s as something that could be abused in the wrong hands.
There are bound to be refinements to how this update affects search results, and we will be keeping our eyes peeled with regards to any large shifts in the search engine results pages.
