Wednesday, August 08, 2012

The Panda Ate My Links


The Google Panda algorithm – a major rewrite of its core algorithm which launched in early 2011 – has had some unintended consequences in the web. While the intention was to reduce the abuse to link farms, scrapers, and paid linking, ZD Net’s recent article notes that the result has been a mass reduction of hyperlinks – even the legitimate ones.

Panda is turning what used to be a best practice of having lots of links from other sites into a warning signal that your site might be over-optimized and deceitful. Beyond incentivizing blogs and other sites to remove legitimate hyperlinks for fear of being tagged as illegitimate, it has also created a new generation of “page-rank assassins,” where a website can sink a competitor’s website by paying for link farms to link to the competition’s website. Google realizes the bad links, sinks the competitor’s search ranking, and you’ve effectively hobbled your competition.

ZDNet argues that the real issue with Panda is its inability to decipher high quality from low quality, and copied content from original content. In some cases, “scaper” sites (sites which copy content from other websites and add ads, etc) are in fact scoring higher than the original sites themselves. Some firms have gone as far as to issue legal warnings to people to stop linking to their site! (http://boingboing.net/2012/07/20/seo-company-rep-says-its-ill.html)

While I understand Panda’s goal of reducing link farms and punishing the black hat perpetrators, it seems that Panda could use additional intelligence around original vs. copied links. Any ideas on how Panda could be improved? Or how Google could stop page-rank assassins?

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