One thing with this farmer/panda Google update that seems to be impacting a lot of sites, is that there are many examples of sites producing original content and other sites taking their content and outranking them. In short, Google is confusing the site that created the content and labeling them as a low quality site, and then ranking a site that stole the content above the original content creator.
This has always been an issue for some webmasters. But since the farmer / panda update, it has become more of an issue for these webmasters.
Matt Cutts recently addressed this in a video:
He suggests things that we mostly all know:
- They crawl fast
- Prioritize based on PageRank
- Tweets may be followed faster
- Hook up pubsubhubbub to push out these update (although limited)
- Use the DMCA request to make one who stole your content remove the content
- Also submit a spam report
Matt said it is possible that Google would outrank a stolen piece of content over your original piece of content.
What is cool, is that Matt said Google can almost crawl the entire web at the same time and Google can potentially crash the web if they did that.
Anyway, Google's DMCA page is getting hit hard because lots of webmasters are using it now. In fact, it had major issues this week as reported at the Google Webmaster Help forums.
In any event, I am not sure if this will help many of you who feel your content was stolen and you were hit by Panda and they weren't.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
