If you use Google as your main search tool you may have noticed some strange search results this past week. You may have found that many of your favorite sites are no longer listed. No you are not going crazy, you are looking at the end result of Panda 4. Once every couple of years Google engineers create new code that deciphers what results you see on your screen when you do a search. About 3 years ago, Google released an update called Panda 3 that turned the search results into mush. It took most of that time for everything to normalize and get decent search results again. The results were so bad that I personally switched to Bing for all my everyday searches.

 

After this last update, it looks like I will be continuing to use Bing as basic searches are again turning up some undesirable results. If you are an E Bay shopper, chances are you are not going to find any items you want using Google. Google banished 80% of the organic search results for the online marketplace. They are not the only major companies that have been affected. Important sites such as ask.com, yellowpages.com and History.com have also been banished from the search results. Why does this happen? It is actually unknown whether these results are intentional or if it is just some unpredictable behavior that Google did not expect. After all, I like to see results from E Bay when I am doing searches for a product. If I can save a few bucks buying an item on E Bay that is always a good thing.

 

The sites that had the most increase in rank from the new Panda release are essentially neither sites that I have never heard of nor sites that I would ever want to go to. One of those sites is shopstyle.com. Essentially, Google is killing off many of your favorite sites and nobody actually knows why. The only way this trend is going to stop is if people start using Bing or Yahoo to do their searching. Bing has already taken about 2% of the traffic away from Google but they still dominate with about 70% of the searches. I think we all ask ourselves one important question; what is broken Google or my website. If you guessed the first answer you will most likely be correct. Google is the one that is broken and is creating a wave of destruction all along its path.

 

Essentially, Google engineers are constantly writing new code to organize the websites that are included in its database. Although these programs are tested in the lab there is no real way to know an end result until it is released into the wild. Once a major update is released the entire database becomes scrambled. The whole point is to try and stop spam but often times this backfires and things just do not materialize as intended.

 

In short, if you are not finding your favorite sites, try using another search tool such as Bing to do your searching. You have the added bonus of actually getting something for free. If you start an account, you get points for every search that you do. You can then cash in those points for things like 100 megs of free space on One Drive or gift cards for places such as Amazon. Where else can you get paid to search? Google will not pay you for your searches. Points can add up fast especially if you follow the steps in your dashboard. It’s fun, the search results are great and you get rewarded. What more can you ask for!

Article By, Ross A Deprey