The update I was fretting about back in February has arrived on our doorstep. Google rolled Panda out to all English-language searches last week, which means the version the US has been living with since late February is now shaping the results the rest of us see.
For anyone who missed the naming saga: when this first hit America the industry called it the Farmer update, because it was clearly aimed at content farms. Then word got out that it was named after an engineer called Panda, and that name has stuck. Same update, better story.
We had a head start, which I’m grateful for now. Watching the US fallout for six weeks told us roughly what to expect, and the pattern over there was consistent. Sites that scaled thin, samey content got hammered. Article mills, cheap comparison pages, sites where the content plainly existed to carry adverts rather than inform anyone. Some big names lost half their search visibility overnight and haven’t got it back.
A few things I’ve taken from watching it play out:
- This is a site-wide judgement, not a page-by-page one. That is the part people underestimate. A pile of weak pages appears to drag down the good ones sitting alongside them. You can’t just fix your best content and leave the rubbish in place; the rubbish is the problem.
- Recovery is slow. The US sites that cleaned up didn’t bounce straight back. The update seems to re-run periodically rather than continuously, so you fix things and then wait, sometimes weeks, to find out if it worked. Nobody enjoys that.
- “Block, delete or improve” beats endless tinkering. The sites that reacted well made hard decisions about whole sections of their site rather than fiddling with meta descriptions.
At the city guide we came out of this reasonably intact, and I think it is because we’d already started the tidying I wrote about in February. Not because we’re clever, more because the warning signs were impossible to miss and we chose to act on them early rather than argue about it.
What I don’t yet know is how this settles. The US results have kept shifting since February, so “we survived round one” is not the same as “we’re safe”. This is the second version in eight weeks. There will be a third.
I’ll write again when we’ve seen enough of the UK numbers to say something firmer. Right now it is a week old here and I’m still refreshing Analytics more often than is good for me.
