It has been almost a week since Google confirmed their most recent Panda algorithm change, and that has given many experts plenty of time to really dig into what the changes have meant in the rankings. To start with, it has been found that between 3 and 5 percent of searches have been impacted, which is actually quite significant for these types of changes.
Some specific things that have resulted in a loss of rankings has been found to be those with thin content or repetitive information. For example, since there are thousands of sites that offer the lyrics of songs, and all of them are the same. Many of these sites found that their rankings have dropped significantly.
The sites that seem to be the big winners are news sites, blogs with original content, and any sites that publish lengthy (though still high quality) content. This obviously fits into Google’s long stated goal of having their search results lead to pages that users actually find useful.
Some experts suggest that this update is putting a stronger weight on the bounce rate of sites. This would mean that sites with a higher bounce rate will find themselves lower in the rankings. Of course, this is just a theory, but it makes sense based on what we are seeing.
As more and more data continues to be analyzed after this change it seems certain that this update will have a negative impact on any sites that are simply attempting to drive traffic at all costs.
