Farmer/Panda Update for Google Searches

Google has just had a major update to its Google Search engine that had a significant affect on what results be shown. The update was to start in USA then be rolled out to other countries.

The major change in the update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

I have been looking at Google search results for more then eleven years now, the first time was getting my work website to be number one on a specific Google search when Alta Vista was still king. The key at that time was getting quality sites related to information on our website to link back to our website.

Google Mission is "to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful". This change in algorithm will make useful information more accessible. But the reality is the majority of research information I find is from Wikipedia and significant amount of other information I find is from Social Media like Facebook. Facebook has now a significant amount of the worlds information in a walled garden.

One other factor that should be included in Google algorithm is to somehow include factor of how long a person was on that page after clicking it. That to me is the best sign of how useful that search result was for the Google search.

The key for me going forward is how to access information on mobiles and currently I am only accessing gmail, facebook and twitter information on my mobile.