Panda: EU Commission Yet To Decide Whether To Issue a Satement of Objection to Google | Google Penalty World | Scoop.it

From the ReadWriteWeb official article: 


"...the Commission has yet to come to a decision over whether to issue a Statement of Objections to Google, specifically with respect to an official investigation into whether the company weights search results - especially searches for commercial products - against certain sites, including online retailers."


"Although the Panda upgrades resulted in very noticeably reduced instances of "scrapers" appearing in Google search results, one of the more interesting side-effects for a multitude of legitimate, "non-scraper" Web sites was a sudden drop in overall traffic across the board, which analytics could directly attribute to reduced referrals from Google, especially from Google News.


Theoretically, one of the unintended - and perhaps unavoidable - side-effects of Panda's more vigorous filtering may have been to reduce the level of assessed popularity of a multitude of topics, especially those pertaining to technology, from Google search results.


That popularity is believed to be a direct factor in determining placement for headlines in Google News.


While the real reason for the reduction in instances of certain articles may actually be due to vigorous filtering, the effect from Google News' perspective could appear the same as if the whole world stopped being interested in such topics by about 40%."


"The urgent need for action has become even more acute since Google's introduction of its 'Panda' algorithmic update earlier this year," Verhayen wrote Almunia."


With Panda, Google is now targeting many established vertical search brands, as well as emerging ones. Panda's algorithmic demotions are more subtle than their predecessors.

Although affected sites do not completely disappear from Google's search results, they are systematically demoted to a point beyond the reach of most users, and so receive little or no traffic from this vital channel.
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Read the full article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/01/eu-commission-no-decision-yet.php