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When the Google Panda first debuted, it is expected that content farms will be greatly affected as this update targets low-quality sites that were ranking well in Google search results. Content farms are those sites with low quality content and then stuff it full of ads. One of these well-known content farms is eHow.

Well, many users thought that a lot of eHow articles were garbage. If that indicator really is the primary change in this Panda update, then we expect that eHow will be penalized for many of its shallow articles. Take note also that the Panda update incorporates information from the block feature of Google Chrome. This is one of the features of Google Chrome browser which is able to block sites from their search results. For example, if you run a search on a particular keyword and think that one of the results is irrelevant, you can tell the Google Chrome never to show any results from that site again. Many users nowadays are blocking some of eHow articles because they find it insubstantial and useless. It is apparent that eHow is more concerned with ads regardless of the quality of the article.

There are speculations that although eHow might be considered the most well-known content farm, it managed to escaped the effects of Google Panda and actually increased in many rankings. But according to Sistrix which released data on the impact of the Google Panda update on a number of popular sites months after it was introduced, eHow’s visibility on Google dropped by an enormous 66%. On the other hand, eHow responded with a public statement stating that while their search engine traffic did decrease, it wasn’t nearly as severe as what Sitrix reported. They also added that they were increasingly generating traffic from sources other than search engines and that they had many other profitable sites beside eHow.

The case of eHow is a great example showing the effects of Google Panda update on content farms. However, it is also a realization that a well ranking in Google comes with a unique and high quality content. So, if you want your site to appear on Google’s top results pages, think of such perspective.

In SEO industry nowadays, everyone is talking about the impact of Google Panda. There are a few sites who managed to escape its slap while many others are burned to the ground. According to Google’s statement regarding the Panda update, this line could be the most important to bear in mind for any webmaster:

“... In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. ...”

That means that if a part of your site has low quality content (according to Google’s latest definition of it), the ranking of your site as a whole could suffer. From that insight, one area which is greatly affected is the ecommerce sites. Ecommerce sites run afoul on a number of things that Google might now consider low-quality content. The following point out how ecommerce sites might be penalized according to Google’s description of low quality content:

Shallow Content: This is very common to ecommerce sites which have many products with little or no product description. Usually, we see a widget having a short product description in an ecommerce site but even a descriptive sentence is not enough and might still be considered as shallow content. The ideal one is a 250-word product description for each product but if you can’t come up with that, at least, a minimum of 100 words is acceptable.

Duplicate Content: Again, most ecommerce sites violate this. If your site has the same content page after page, Google will pick just one of them to rank. For instance, if you have 10 widgets although in different sizes but have identical description, it is still considered an internal duplicate content. Although it won’t hurt the ranking of your entire site, only one of those pages will be ranked. Also, your description for every product and category as well as your meta description should be unique.

Copied Duplicate Content: This one is almost the same with internal duplicate content but your content is coming from another website. An example of this is an ecommerce site which is the site owner as well as a distributor. Typically, it will just copy the product description from the manufacturer. Now, that is considered a copied duplicate content. If you violate this, it could hurt the rankings of your entire site even if only a few pages on your site are using that copied duplicate content.

Those were the categories in which the Google Panda affects ecommerce sites. Now, we know that even if only a part of your ecommerce site has what Google sees as low quality content, the ranking of your entire site can suffer as a result.

Over time, Google realized that there are many tricks and tweaks that webmasters or site owners are practicing in order to rank their websites on search engine results pages. Thus, Google change their ranking methodology and in came Google Panda. It is the latest update which brings an entirely new way for Google to evaluate websites in its search results. Although they still consider many criteria that they have in the past, this new element of their ranking methodology can greatly affect SEO.

It is clear that Google Panda wants better quality websites in its results. This also means that signals from other websites were given less importance and the thing that really matters here is what the actual users think about the website. With this new update, Google is now equipped with automated users’ power in determining its search results. It is user-powered without the user having to do anything different about it. In so doing, Panda prevents lower quality sites from tricking Google into thinking that they are of higher quality.

On the other hand, Panda factors various user signals in order to help Google determine the quality of a website. For example, it examines "Time on Site" as a way to determine how quality of an experience the user is having on a given site. It also considers the bounce rate, which is a measure of the percentage of people that leave a site without doing anything. Social signals such as shares and +1's were given importance too in order to see if people are recommending a certain webpage. To see how people are navigating through a particular site, page views per visit were also given attention. Moreover, Google Panda rewards Branded Search Traffic or the amount of people that are specifically looking for a given site. For example, if your music site is called "Blues Around the Corner" and there is an increasing amount of people searching for "Blues Around the Corner" to get to your website, Google will then recognize that your site is being enjoyed by many users.

All in all, the Panda update utilizes usage metrics which signal Google how users value a certain webpage or website. This is also their way to determine if the content that the reader lands on is truly high in quality. If before, you are more concerned with unique content in order to rank well in Google, with this update, you should change your perspective for a unique content that is also of high quality.