brinked - 9:23 pm on Jun 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

Lets focus on the things we do know now that panda has been around for several months now and google has released some statements regarding panda. I know a lot of people don't want to but lets start taking what Matt Cutts says as fact.

Facts:

- Panda is aimed at reducing the rankings for low quality websites. Basically the reason behind panda is to push down the websites whose only purpose is to put out a bunch of useless content and profit off it otherwise known as "content farms". Why do people put out content farms? To make money off them.

- Matt Cutts has just said media sites with no text such as flickr have nothing to do with panda. This is a very big clue. A lot of people have been assuming that panda was targeting lack of content but it appears the problem may be the actual content itself. What does this tell me? This tells me that panda is focused on hitting sites who only put text on pages for the sole purpose of having it rank.

- Panda has some bugs. Google is aware of the issue on scraper sites outranking the original source and they are in the process of correcting it. No big surprise here but it is good to receive some confirmation that they are aware of this issue and are going to correct it.

- The reason why most panda effected sites have not recovered is because google has not re ran its data yet. According to MC, there is going to be a new update coming out so hopefully we will start hearing about some sites recovering.

- Ads play a role in panda. I am going to put this down as a fact regardless of who disagrees with me. The ads themselves will not get you in panda but it is all about intention of your content. If you have ads on poor content pages, this throws a signal to google that you are trying to profit off your low quality content. I have seen 2 thin affiliate sites by the same owner come back to the top 10 after panda was released and both sites have all the affiliate links removed. This is a strong indication to me that google is now ranking these sites because they no longer have ads on it. You can feel free to call this a theory but I have seen enough data and done enough research to label this as a fact in my mind.