Search Engine Marketing

Breaking News: Panda Update and EMD Algorithm Rolling Out Now
Buckle up, folks – it’s been a busy week for search. The folks at Google and co. have thrown webmasters yet another curve ball – and this one comes in the form of tandem algorithm updates. I write for quite a few tech blogs, and I just reported on the exact match domain (EMD) update a couple of days ago. The interwebs have been ablaze with folks who’ve already felt the fury of the new algo’s wrath, and I have been glued to my keyboard reporting the news. Then, tonight, I stumbled upon this breaking announcement on Search Engine Roundtable: Hmm. Interesting. Of course, if you’ve been in the world of SEO for even a short stretch of time, then you are fully aware that Google never makes hasty algo changes. Everything is carefully engineered, vigorously tested, and heavily premeditated. To be sure, the overlapping timing of the EMD and the new Panda update are no accident. On that note, let’s look at what changed, reactions ‘round the Web, and steps Big G is taking to keep its agenda under lock and key.
The EMD Update – How Things Went Down

Okay, so first let’s deal with the exact match domain update. Things started heating up when Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, sent out a couple of tweets on September 28 announcing the change. Here’s one of them:

Cutts EMD Update Tweet
As you can see, the EMD update is a completely autonomous beast. It’s not part of the now-infamous Panda or Penguin updates and refreshes. It’s an independent algoethm. You know how SEOs have advised you for years to buy exact match domain names? Yeah, that’s what this update is fighting back against. Perhaps it’s the end of an era. Here’s a little more insight from the team over at Search Engine Land:


This should come as no surprise. If you follow SEO news regularly, you may recall frequent off-the-cuff threats from Cutts and co. aimed at thin affiliate or AdSense websites bearing EMDs. They’ve been warning us for years now. Well, it’s finally come to pass, and many people who have made a healthy living off ranking these kinds of sites are now in the throes of restructuring their business model.

I spent hours reading of their woes. Well-known webmasters who have built empires manufacturing and ranking niche sites with EMDs are wailing en masse – it’s a veritable bloodbath out there. People are claiming 60 – 100% of their portfolios have tanked overnight. The silver lining? It’s still early, and as with any Google update, it will take some time for the dust to settle and the real winners and losers to emerge.

A Panda Falls atop the EMD Update
Then, the plot thickened. Search Engine Roundtable announced that Google confirmed a Panda update began baking into the index on September 27. It’s not your ho-hum data refresh, either – it’s one of the big ones… an update for the algo in its entirety. That means that old and new websites alike will be affected by the change without so much as touching their existing website content. Fun. Here’s the official quote that Matt Cutts issued to SER shortly following the rollout:

“Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 9/27. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday 9/27, but the full rollout is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example).”

Remember, Panda is all about on-page issues. Your website content, your URLs (hello!), your H1 tags… all that good stuff. I find it highly interesting that G coupled a massive Panda update with this new EMD algorithm.

Do you smell a trend here?

All the webmasters I came across who were bemoaning drops in the SERPs seemed to have one thing in common – their websites were chock-full of 500-word wonders, complete with regurgitated data, keywords galore, and less-than-stellar prose. It’s still all about the quality content (now more than ever), and the bottom line is that outsourced copy for $5 a pop will sink you faster than a boat with a hole.

Sweeping Secrets under the Rug
So, is it really an accident that Google rolled out overlapping updates? The guys at Search Engine Roundtable say no. According to them, the double whammy will make it tough for webmasters to discern the reason for any drop in the SERPs. Did a website get hit by the EMD update? Or was it an attack on low-quality content brought on by Panda?

No, they think the overlapping was a deliberate attempt by Matt and the gang to confound webmasters, and I agree. I don’t like it either – I have niche sites myself – but I agree that confusing us was the objective. If our sites tanked after the EMD update, we’d (pretty much) know why. Now, since Panda’s running too, we… well, we won’t. Here’s a comment from the original announcement that summed the situation up best for me:


If you’re wondering what the way forward will be from here, don’t. Not yet. We’re still a couple of weeks away from the final verdict about our rankings, so hold tight for now. Once you’ve figured out where you’ve landed, that’s when it’s time to regroup. And by regroup, I mean dramatically diversifying your online marketing efforts away from Google alone.

Another step to reward high-quality sites

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we're not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can't divulge specific signals because we don't want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change:

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer