Con fecha 24 de Febrero Google ha anunciado en su blog oficial un importante cambio en su algoritmo:
“This 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.”
En los círculo seo se ha denominado a esta actualización como “Panda update” (también “Farmer update”). Aunque en principio solo se ha aplicado a la versión americana del buscador, en las próximas semanas se irá implementando a nivel internacional.
Alguna reflexiones al respecto:
– Se penaliza especialmente los sitios web que según google tengan contenido de baja calidad (en especial el contenido copiado). Pero claro ¿quien le pone el cascabel al gato?. En una entrevista en wired, se le preguntaba a los representantes de Google lo siguiente:
Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site? Do you have to wind up defining low quality content?
Singhal: That’s a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem
En otra palabras, parece que ni ellos lo tienen muy claro
– Consecuencia inmediata de lo anterior es la gran bajada en tráfico que han sufrido por ejemplo los directorios de articulos, que se nutren mayoritariamente de contenido duplicado aportado por los usuarios. Unas estadisticas publicadas en sistrix reportaban cuales habían sido algunas de las principales webs afectadas:
Pero también hay mas tipos de webs que pueden verse afectados (fuente):
What kind of sites are subject to this algorithmic change?
- Content Farms. Examples include Demand Media, eHow, Huffington Post, Mahalo, and Article Marketing sites.
- E-Commerce Sites which do not have substantive or unique content on product descriptions. This is typical of data-feed driven e-commerce sites.
- Scraper Websites. Websites which syndicate or scrape or steal content from other sites and then repost it.
- Coupon Driven Websites. Like e-commerce sites, these do not generally provide substantially unique or useful content.
No obstante algunos autores apuntan que se deben dar algunas especiales circunstancias para “activar” esta penalización en nuestro site:
- It has to be a big site, lots of pages is a fundament of this filter.
- The site is not an authority. We found that sites over a certain level of authority are spared the filter even though they otherwise fall in the category.
- The site has lots of ads. To many ads on a page is one of the fators activating the filter.
- The site is visible on a lot of long tail searches.
- The site has thin content.
– Es preocupante el dominio absoluto que ejerce Google en el mundo de las búsquedas desde hace años, y como miles de webs y empresas se ven afectadas por las decisiones (legítimas, no lo discuto) que toma. Una de las mayores críticas que se ha efectuado a Google con esta actualización del algoritmo es de que precisamente google es uno de los mayores inductores indirectosde este tipo de webs de gracias a su programa de publicidad Adsense y sus secuelas:los llamados MFA webs (made for adsense sites). Uno de los comentarios ade la entevista anteriormente mencionada refleja precisamente este hecho:
“Google has a fundamental conflict of interest that may be impossible to solve: the "shallow" content they are claiming they want to eliminate is on MFA (Made for AdSense) sites. IF those sites weren't making them money they could simply delete every page that has three blocks of AdSense on it and eliminate most of the crappy sites.
Does anyone think they will actually do that? Google CREATED that problem to increase their income. Do you think they are going to reduce their income on purpose? If you do, I hear there is a bridge out Arizona way for sale.
It is about time people realized that allowing any company to have a monopoly on search endangers every business that counts on traffic from search. The solution is for Internet users to use alternative search engines and I challenge ever blogger to start writing posts about alternatives. “
– Si nos centramos en las connotaciones SEO del cambio, yo antes que nada aconsejaría calma, en primer lugar porque es muy pronto para evaluar a fondo la situación, y en segundo lugar porque,como tantas veces ha pasado no hay que sobredimensionar los cambios, porque en el fondo tampoco cambian tanto los fundamentos básicos para conseguir buenas posiciones en los buscadores: buena optimización onsite, contenido abundante y de calidad (aquí si que cobra más importancia este factor) y unos backlinks diversificados (que procedan de varios tipos de fuentes). Nihil novum sub sole
– Evidentemente para algunas webs la situación habrá cambiado substancialmente (tal como veiamos anteriormente en el caso de los directorios de artículos). Pero en la mayoría de casos estos simples consejos pueden bastar (ver fuente original):
Readdress your ad-to-content ratio. If you’re focused too much on ads, you could improve your site’s “usefulness” by removing some ads or beefing up content.
Remove or redirect poor quality pages. This allows the high-quality pages to shine all the brighter. The lower quality pages can negatively impact the entire domain.
Get involved in social media (and traditional media). It will help you be perceived as a brand that interacts with customers outside of search
Yo añadiría por mi parte disminuir el peso en nuestra estrategia de backlinks a la difusión de artículos y notas de prensa.
– Y ya para finalizar dejo una serie de hilos y comentarios interesantes, para quien quiera ahondar más en el tema (y que van en la línea de lo que exponíamos anteriormente):
“I haven't changed my backlinking style at all. Then and still now I try to keep a diverse portfolio of backlinks, so there isn't any reason to change it up now. Article backlinks are still worth something, so there's no reason to completely change up your plan and throw them out. “
“Yes I would agree that webmasters are overreacting with the new Google Panda Update”
– http://blogoscoped.com/forum/177740.html
“Google can't detect low-quality content because quality is subjective. Google can't even distinguish an original article from a post that quotes the article. I've searched for the title of an article from AllThingsD and the top result was a page from a news aggregator.”
– http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4273051.htm
“It's this: in order to target content farms and work out their "true" authority, G dialled down the emphasis on internal linking. Therefore sites with good external links to every single page are doing great, but sites that depended on sheer size and internal linking to rank, have tanked. “
– http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2104646
“Some keyword stats for Mahalo:
"mahalo" – From #1 to #3 <- WOW.
“how to play guitar” – From #1 to #7
“bed bath and beyond coupons” – From #2 to #13
“fallout 3 walkthrough” – From #1 to #4
“to get pregnant” – From #2 to #119
“filestube” – From #5 to #81
“best christmas movies” – From #6 to #19
“outback steakhouse coupons” – From #1 to #5
For EzineArticles:
“acai berry” – #9 to #194
“reverse phone lookup” – #14 to #45
“penis enlargement” – #4 to #65
“article submission” – #2 to #12
“credit card debt relief” – #1 to #10”–