I think Panda was a conspiracy.

[MarieHaynes]

It's just a theory, but I think that Panda was not really an algorithm update but rather a conspiracy.

Google went out of their way to announce that a new algorithm was being rolled out.  The word on the street was that content farms would be affected.  Low quality sites would be affected.  Scrapers would be affected.  So, everyone with decent sites sat back and said, "Ah...this will be good...my rankings will increase."

And then, the word started coming in that some really good sites took a massive hit.  We've got a lot of theories on what could be causing the hit, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix.

Many of the key factors that have been suggested causes of a site to look bad in Panda's eyes are present on one of my sites, but this site actually increased in rankings after Panda.

So, this is my theory:  I think that Google made some random changes that made no sense.  They made changes that would cause some scraper sites to go down but they also knew that many decent sites would decline as well.

Why would they do this?  The result is fantastic in Google's eyes.  They have the whole world of web design doing all they can to create the BEST quality site possible.  People are removing duplicate content, reducing ad clutter and generally creating the best site possible.  And this, is the goal of Larry Page and Sergey Brin...to make it so that Google gives the user the BEST possible sites to match their query.

I think that a month or so from now there will be a sudden shift in the algo again and many of those decent sites will have their good rankings back again.  The site owners will think it's because they put hard work into creating good quality, so they will be happy.  And Google will be happy because the web is a better place.

What do you think?

[j0a0vargas]

hahahaha. I agree with you. First Google manipulates results to see if Bing is copying. Soon after this update comes with all the care that is creating its own content sites optimized for the robots and we can not think of duplicate content. hehehehe

[bemcapaz]

Actually I really liked the "content registry" idea.

An library of content where you could register what you have created and, optional, a link to where you want to be considered the main source.

At least it would be 10x more usefull than the google knol idea..

[EGOL]

I would pay a fee to protect my best content in the Google SERPs.

[SteveOllington]

Actually you have a point there... if JC Penny was indeed the catalyst (which I could easily imagine it being) then the time between that and the update would surely mean it would have to have been rushed. I never considered that before.

[EGOL]

ha ha...  I think they did rush this out.... they were quickly trying to pull up their pants after getting embarassed from the JCPenny problem... they needed to bust a few heads quickly...

[StalkerB]

Ha ha, maybe

I think it's something infinitely less planned out and they simply rushed this change out the door without understanding fully what it would do to the SERPs.

Although I do think you're right that in a few months (in what will be claimed to be a second Panda sweep) that things will go back and only the very worst offenders will stay penalised.

[SteveOllington]

Yes I like the content registry idea! It would probably be necessary to pay for it as a service though, and to cover dupes that are okay maybe they could just allow dupes as long as they reference back to the source in the registry (for news, quotations, etc... where dupes can't be avoided).

[EGOL]

Interesting ideas.  Thanks for sharing them.

I think that Google is talking a lot about this as a "quality website update"... and that is getting them attention in the media but it is also kicking a lot of webmasters in the butt to clean up their websites.

I think that google should make a "content registry" where I can submit my content and say "this is mine" and then copies or spins of that content will not get traction in the SERPs.

And, I think that they should take a closer look at websites in the Adsense program because the ability to monetize crap and theft is driving lot of bad odor in the SERPs.

[SteveOllington]

Haha I like it!!

Well, if it's not what happened, they'll wish they thought of it anyway lol

My view on why other sites got hit is just that they had at least some links coming from sites that got hit... i.e. got 100 backlinks, 10 are from articles on article sites, article sites get hit... lose 10 backlinks (or at least lose some of the value from some of those backlinks)... hence, good site takes a hit too