Google's not so cuddly Panda strikes again

Google struck an almighty blow at webmasters everywhere last week when they unleashed their “oh my god what are you doing” algorithm update targeting low quality EMD sites.  Mike talked about it here.

The forums have since been going mental with webmasters and SEO “gurus” trying to get their heads around an update which was far from small and seemed to affect more than just exact match domains.  Something else had to be going on.

It seems that a certain Mr Cutts at Google forgot to mention that they just also unleashed an update to their dreaded Panda algorithm the day before, and it’s still rolling out.

We’re not talking cute and cuddly pandas here, Google’s Panda algorithm is quite vicious at taking down sites it thinks are low quality.  How on Earth it decides what is quality and what isn’t is far from clear.  Many very good websites have been taken down by the big bear.

So, if your site got demoted at the end of last week and you thought it was the EMD update, take another look at your rankings.  If you don’t have an exact match domain and your site is nowhere, then it looks like the panda has managed to get its claws into your website too.

And a big thanks to Google for throwing both these significant updates out there together, they certainly caused the mass confusion that they probably expected would happen (like we don’t have enough to be getting on with)!!