Known news sites emerge early winners of Google’s Panda update

Early data from leading independent search marketing specialist and technology firm Greenlight, reveals big winners and losers, visibility-wise, from Google's Panda algorithm update – designed to improve Google's ability to detect and devalue ''low quality content'', which it has now rolled out across all English language websites.

Hot on the heels of its algorithm update to combat duplicate content in February, Google followed up with ''Panda'', another algorithm change that hits purveyors of ''low quality content in March.

Generally perceived to have been designed to tackle content farms, it destroys the rankings of sites which many Google users are sick and tired of seeing in the search engine results pages.

As soon as Panda was released in the US, Greenlight built a sample keyword set and started tracking visibility for this keyword set on Google.co.uk on a daily basis.

Greenlight's early data reveals winners are largely made up of well known news sources such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, Yahoo.com, Times Online and The BBC, along with YouTube and a couple of other sites.

Meanwhile, big losers appear to include article and content directories such as HubPages and Ezine Articles, review sites like DooYoo.co.uk, "how too" sites like Videojug and eHow.  Most devastatingly of all, another review site, Ciao, has lost 99 per cent of its search engine visibility in Google.co.uk.

''Naturally in an algorithm update of this scope, there have been numerous smaller niche sites that have both gained and lost from Panda, many of which would appear in the table below if we focus only on pure percentage gains or losses in reach'', say Adam Bunn, Director of SEO (search engine optimization) at Greenlight. ''Whilst the data is available, we feel the most immediately interesting stories are to be found in the fortunes (or misfortunes) of the bigger, more well known sites that appear in the list.''

The effects of big algorithm updates tend to last a while, with ranking fluctuations occuring for several days or even weeks. Given this being early data, Greenlight will be following up once things have had a chance to settle down, to see if anything has changed.

The average aggregate reach of sites pre- and post- Panda is shown in the table below, along with the percentage change in reach

Google Panda – Winners and Losers

Site	Reach, pre Panda	Reach, post Panda	Change
goodtoknow.co.uk	10,999	21,615	97 per cent
howtogetridofstuff.com	5,398	9,672	79 per cent
guardian.co.uk	24,995	42,465	70 per cent
ask.com	28,707	48,192	68 per cent
telegraph.co.uk	17,483	27,268	56 per cent
instyle.co.uk	6,333	9,676	53 per cent
youtube.com	18,016	27,441	52 per cent
which.co.uk	23,574	35,473	50 per cent
howstuffworks.com	19,579	28,254	44 per cent
allwomenstalk.com	80,820	112,327	39 per cent
yahoo.com	32,310	42,438	31 per cent
cnet.co.uk	23,954	29,833	25 per cent
timesonline.co.uk	19,641	23,365	19 per cent
gizmodo.com	9,923	11,696	18 per cent
bbc.co.uk	41,055	46,863	14 per cent
about.com	152,955	122,006	-20 per cent
ehow.com	47,338	30,843	-35 per cent
hubpages.com	23,063	9,296	-60 per cent
reviewcentre.com	27,680	9,792	-65 per cent
wisegeek.com	27,973	7,279	-74 per cent
buzzle.com	12,877	3,181	-75 per cent
ehow.co.uk	5,096	949	-81 per cent
ezinearticles.com	37,232	6,775	-82 per cent
electricpig.co.uk	9,587	1,275	-87 per cent
pixmania.co.uk	6,197	764	-88 per cent
dooyoo.co.uk	4,973	202	-96 per cent
videojug.com	27,166	814	-97 per cent
articlesbase.com	24,080	506	-98 per cent
usnews.com	12,704	184	-99 per cent
ciao.co.uk	13,222	91	-99 per cent

Source: Greenlight
 
"Reach" is effectively visibility. It ascribes a percentage of the available monthly searches for a keyword as reach to a site based on its ranking position.  Greenlight calculates reach based on eyetracking studies that show sites ranking in position 1 are visible to 100 pwer cent of search engine users, whereas sites ranking in position 10 are only visible to 20 per cent. On this basis, if a keyword is searched for 1,000 times each month, and a site ranks in position 1 for that keyword, Greenlight gives it a reach of 1,000 for that keyword.

Because of the widely held perception that Panda was designed to tackle content farms, We chose a broad keyword set that reflected the kind of informational searches that content farms tend to target. These informational searches were split across 10 verticals: automotive, beauty, fashion, finance, health, home improvements, marketing, sports, technology and travel.

As rankings were tracked on a daily basis, Webuilt up an accurate picture of the sites that tended to consistently rank for a large number of keywords in the data set, which it compared to ranking data after Panda.

(Also see: Adam Bunn's: eCommerce sites should clean up before Google unleashes Panda)