It has just been confirmed that Google Panda 2 ran last week.
Panda 1 took the ecommerce world storm just a few weeks ago when it annihilated a huge number of websites and dropped them down the rankings.
The masters of the Universe Google are on a mission to rid the internet of those who pretend they are something they are not. Websites that act like Black Holes, sucking in searchers and spitting them out towards the true merchant websites.
Google doesn’t like websites that dominate key search terms and which operate effectively as middle men; richly rewarded as they pass on their catch of users to the merchants.
And the real hatred of Google is poor content. The search engine is determined to stamp out poor, irrelevant and duplicated content.
And Google Panda 2, which actually began its operational life in February and is a continuing programme (we’re on 2.2 now), is turning its attention to scraped content.
This is when webmasters literally scrape content from another website and use it on their own. What makes matters worse, is that the nicked content, dropped onto large sites, can often be better ranked than its original source, creating a double whammy for the operator who’s commissioned it in the first place.
And the ultimate insult, in some cases, the originator of the content has then been penalised for duplicated copy and sent down the rankings!
So Google is on a mission to reward original content and mark-down those that believe content scraping is the way they can build their own websites.
So scrapers be warned; you’re end could be nigh.