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Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

Changes that Google made, designed to reduce the number of "low quality links" in search results, such as those to content farms. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-qua...

Rather than being an algorithm change, it seems to be a process that Google runs only occasionally, which labels entire sites (rather than individual pages) as low quality. Sites with that label are penalized in search results.

It affected many sites, including those that aren't content farms (mine included,) in what many webmasters believe is collateral damage.

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I've found many of the claims of collateral damage to be from sites that I don't honestly feel were adding much value to our lives, even if they weren't strictly content farms.

I'd be interested to hear your specific story?

My site that was penalized is The Online Slang Dictionary. http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ It's the oldest slang dictionary on the web and had the only freely accessible slang thesaurus on the web until about a month ago. In contrast to other slang dictionaries, The Online Slang Dictionary is only for legitimate slang words.

I've never used any black-hat or even slightly questionable SEO techniques or means to publicize the site. It started being penalized April 11, which is the launch date of what (IIRC) is being called "Panda 2.0". I've made many changes in hopes of fixing whatever it is that's causing Google to decide that the site is low quality, but haven't seen any improvement in ranking since then. A (now outdated) list of those changes is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2664346 .

Your website comes up as the 4th results for "slang dictionary". Where was it before panda?

#2. It's fallen in Google rankings for nearly every keyword for which it appears at all.

If @WalterGR above is correct, then changes to your site will only help when panda is rerun between one bot visit and the next (ie it's a batch process not a constantly evolved ranking).

If that's true then an awful lot of sites I have heard about may have been wasting time SEO'ing for nothing. (most obvious is serverfault)

Does anyone know if it really is an infrequent labelling run or an algoithm change and or it's run frequency?

Edit: reference to waltergr added correctly

I guess my site was hit by Panda too.. I said guess because all of us are guessing since Google does not bother to inform us. Like you, searching for a keyword, previously lands you in the first page - now it's on the 4th/5th page.

Try searching your site on Bing, Yahoo and see..

videowatchr.com uses Google video search and the youtube API to show youtube videos. So of course, it will have duplicate content.

If you use an API, you are getting someone's content most likely, does that make you a content farm? How about if you use an RSS feed?

Google should publish guidelines on this Panda - so we're not guessing.

Here's my collateral damage story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763272

There are definitely high quality sites that were hit by Panda.

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