Google Panda stumbles
By Sumir Singh

During the last few years, a number of websites started using all kinds of sneaky tricks to increase their traffic and consequentially advertising revenue.  SEO, where your site or article was artificially pushed up Google search results, became a multi million dollar business with Indians being involved at every level. A lot of the SEO work was outsourced to India.

Much of this Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tweaking ended (or was greatly reduced) when Google introduced a software change labeled Panda in early 2011 which detected and stopped tricks used to make a website more popular.  Google’s search engine system is more merit based these days.

So, how has Google’s Panda project affected major websites some of which used Indian free lancers to churn out copious but low cost content which pushed up their rankings?

A website Pandalized.com has been set up to track how Google’s Panda had a severe negative affect on websites like ChaCha, eZineArticles, HubPages, AssociatedContent and others.

Today (Oct 12, 2011) Searchmetrics has detailed how the latest version of Panda botched up prompting some scrutiny and criticism across the net

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Previous updates seemed to be high-confidence decisions – Google generally would not alter the Panda classifications for a couple of weeks.  Panda 2.5 seems to be an exception to that rule – this weeks’ SEO Visibility data shows that large portions of the 2.5 update seem to be rolled back!
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Searchmetrics has found that a very large number of websites including Prnewswire, Hollywood Gossip, and Technorati got back 80-90 percent of their SEO visibility after Panda 2.5 was forced to rollback after its errors in ranking websites.