The new updates that Google has just effected in Panda, its page-rank algorithm system, might pose some threat to paywalls, recent research reports suggest. After the search engine update implemented by the search engine giant, a number of well known and well-established technology sites and paywalls have suffered a sudden setback to their online visibility as their webpages have significantly dropped in the relevant search results.
Sites suffer after new updates
In fact, the paywalls might have been somewhat affected since the webcrawler of Google were not able to access the full website. Prominent sites such as eHow.com and About.com, which belong to the top 25 UK sites list of ComScore, have found themselves to be at the receiving end of this new move.
According to an estimate, the former has lost nearly one third of its Google search results visibility, whereas eHow.com has suffered by more than 50 percent on this count. On the other hand, New York-based online entity Xomba has taken almost 90 percent hit in its search visibility after the Google Panda update. Xomba is also dealing with other crisis as its CEO Nick Veneris informs Google has abruptly stopped serving AdSense ads to its pages after an apparent miscommunication.
What does Google state?
An official intimation from the Google notifying the change states: “We have introduced over a month ago an algorithmic improvement that is designed to assist people in finding more high quality websites in search results. Since then we have already received a positive response about this change, as searchers are getting better results. Many good publishers are also drawing more traffic.
The official note adds:
“We have now rolled out a further improvement to all English-language users globally. We have also incorporated the all-new user feedback signals to assist people get better search results. We’re starting to incorporate data about the sites, which users block into algorithms.”
Low quality sites to fade out
“In addition to this, the change will go deeper into the ‘long tail’ of low quality sites to return higher quality results wherein the algorithm may not have been able to previously make an assessment. The impact of all these new signals is rather smaller in scope than the original change: just about 2 percent of US queries will be affected by a reasonable amount in comparison to almost 12 percent of US queries for the original change.”
High accuracy of algorithm claimed by the search engine
Based on the Google testing, the company has found that the accuracy of algorithm is very high when it comes to detecting website quality. If a site owner believes his or her site is of the highest quality and has still been impacted by this new change, Google is encouraging them to extensively evaluate the different aspects of their site.
