Google's Farmer Update Goes Globally
Google has recently rolled out its Farmer/Panda Update globally to all English-language Google users and has made a few minor updates with an estimated impact of 2% of U.S. queries.
Online, April 20, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Google has recently rolled out its Farmer/Panda Update globally to all English-language Google users and has made a few minor updates with an estimated impact of 2% of U.S. queries.
Before, only the U.S. queries were impacted by the original algorithm update. However, now this change is live for all English queries worldwide. This means that both English speaking countries (for example searches on google.ca, and google.com.au) and English queries in non-English countries (like for a user searching using google.gr who chose to use English-language results) are included.
The initial launch impacted nearly 12% of queries in the United States, so with these in mind, the impact for English-speaking searchers across the world is said to be similar.
In identifying relevant search results, Google has always utilized a number of signals. Some of these signals are found on the page itself (for example the text on a page), some are based on user behavior (such as gathering data about the loading time of pages by utilizing the toolbar data from users who access those pages), and some are on other sites (anchor text in links to a page).
Google has launched two modes for searchers to block specific sites from their search results in recent months. The first mode was a Chrome extension and the second was a block link directly in the search results that comes out once a searcher has clicked from the results to a site and then return to the search results. However, when Panda launched initially, they found an 84% overlap in sites that Panda has negatively impacted and sites that users had blocked with the Chrome extension.
Now, Google is using data about what searchers have blocked in "high confidence situations". Though, this is a secondary rather than primary factor. Searcher's blocking behavior may be used as confirmation if the site fits the overall pattern that this algorithm targets.
The impact of this update is seen to a wider range of sites. Google's in charge of search quality, Amit Singhal, posted in his blog that "this change also goes deeper into the "long tail" of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before".