Google Panda strikes again

Google released the latest version of their Panda algorithm this week (20/05), code name Google Panda 4.0. There have been rumours that Google was planning on releasing a significant update in recent weeks and Matt Cuts head of Spam at Google HQ has confirmed that the update was rolled out this week.

The first Google Panda update in February 2011 changed the SEO industry forever. The algorithm is focused on weeding out those low quality sites that have relied on old school SEO tactics such as link farms and spammy keywords to rank, but don’t offer any real value to their customers in the form of unique and industry relevant content.

There’s not a massive amount of information about this latest update and the particular focuses of it. Google released another algorithm update last week, which was focused on the pay day loans industry and the black hat spammy keywords associated to it, with the two releases in such quick succession its hard to determine the real winners or losers so far.
One big loser, which was picked up by Moz on Tuesday (21/05) is Ebay, it lost a considerable amount of it’s top 10 rankings as the chart below highlights:

Small businesses get bigger voice?

Some experts have been speculating that smaller businesses are going to be the real winner in terms of local SEO. Google best practice suggests that content should be relevant and given that locality is a massive factor in relevance we may find that small businesses start to compete with some of the bigger boys in the search results. Find out more about Local SEO in another of our blogs here.

How does you’re website stack up in terms of SEO best practice? If you’d like us to take a look at it email us at info@cobbdigital for a free assessment.