Websites braced for Google rankings shift

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 5 Oct 2011 at 09:47

Website administrators are braced for changes to Google search rankings after the company said upgrades to the so-called Panda algorithm could cause problems for some sites.

The way Google ranks sites is critical to their success and the search giant created waves when it introduced the Panda algorithm back in April, slashing web traffic to previously popular sites such as about.com by 30%.

The company has confirmed it will again be tweaking the search algorithm, with video content pushed higher up the results.

Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates

And although the latest update is not expected to have the same drastic impact as the April purge of spammy content farms, company workers said there would still be some fallout and sites would see fluctuations on where they ranked.

“Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates,” said Matt Cutts, Google's head of web spam, in a Twitter post.

The latest tweaks come weeks after Google faced questions from US regulator over whether it favoured its own companies in search results, and search-engine optimisation companies remain concerned over the way the latest upgrade effects results.

“This latest Panda incarnation continues to favour unique content, but also puts greater value on content placed as embedded video,” optimisation company Kingpin SEO said in a post on the company blog.

“The change has favoured both YouTube and Android.com. How Panda has helped the latter remains a mystery. As to video sites prospering under the new formula, this only points us further in the direction of hybrid web portals.

"As search engine crawlers develop sufficient power so as to 'look inside' videos and read the contents, that content will be more and more highly indexed and prized.”