Time For Google Panda Webmaster Notifications?

Jun 22, 2011 • 9:10 am | comments

(22) by Barry Schwartz | Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization

Prev Story Next story

Google Panda Notifications As many of you know by now, Panda 2.2 is now confirmed to have rolled out and some sites have seen recoveries while others have not, and others were now hit.

Danny Sullivan wrote a nice explanation on how Panda is more a ranking factor than a algorithm update. He gets into it in detail, but what Panda clearly is, is a penalty that downgrades the rankings of a site for having low quality content. If it is an algorithm update or ranking factor - to me, isn't that important. The result, Google flags your site as having low quality content, you then get pandalized and your whole site can suffer.

It is somewhat similar to other ranking penalties where if your site is deemed to be hiding text, buying links, or going against other Google webmaster guidelines - then the site will suffer. Panda, like PageRank, like paid links, like scraped content and so on are all part of the algorithm. Some are run in real time, and some, like Panda and Google Bowling are run manually.

Which brings me to my next point.

Google Panda Webmaster Notifications:

Google should offer webmaster notifications through emails and Webmaster Tools, like they do so well with since 2007 and has lately bumped up to issue notifications of doorway pages, unnatural links, cloaking, or even generic site issues and wordpress installs being out of date.

So why not tell webmasters if they have excessive or worrisome low quality content and thus need to fix the content on their site in order to regain trust and rankings in Google.

I think Google should send out these notifications because it will clearly tell people if they have a Panda problem or another problem.

Our ongoing coverage and stories on the Content Farmer/Panda update: