Google PandaWell the Panda update has now become old hat and now we can see clearly the exact impact of the update on the Internet. There are three basic kinds of websites which have seen a major impact, both good and bad as a result of the Panda update. Here’s what you need to know.

The Basics of the Panda Update

For those brand new to the world of SEO or those who have been living in a cave for the past six months or so, the Panda update is in essence an effort by Google to do away with the tyranny of the content farms which would put up spammy junk on their websites which targeted pretty much every keyword imaginable with piles of thin content.
The new algorithm was intended to allow Google to filter out more of this thin content and to add in better quality content which would actually have some real value. After all, that’s the main intention behind the Google search engine – to let people search for things they want to know about and get the most relevant results possible.

Content Farms

While most people expected content farms like eHow to be affected most by the Panda update, the real impact was actually felt by other sites, such as HubPages and Suite 101, sites which allow anyone to post whatever content they want to post. eHow wasn’t quite as affected as other sites were, though they also saw a certain amount of impact.
In both cases however, these websites didn’t see all of their content disappear from the first page of the SERPs for popular keywords. The question was really a matter of whether or not the individual pages had real content which was well put together and useful. The sites as a whole had a lot of junk and that had a bad effect on them as a whole, though individual pages which were actually useful did manage to stay in the rankings.

Article Directories

The other kind of site which took a huge hit from the Panda update was the world of article directories. Sites like Ezine Articles, Article Alley and all the others that we’ve all been using to distribute our content in order to build backlinks. The fact is that Ezine saw the least impact because they had higher standards for the content which was published on their site, but all the directories took a huge hit.
The reason for this is simple – people had for years been putting junk onto all these websites which had no value to them and as such, the new Panda update has had a very bad effect on these kinds of sites. The ones that survive will clean up their acts and insist on high standards for the material they post. The rest will simply disappear.

Small Sites

Finally, smaller, lesser known sites, at least in theory were given a fairer shake thanks to the Panda update on the theory that they had real content which was designed to be more comprehensive (assuming of course the content really was useful and really was original).