Web's Take On...

February 24th, 2011. This date will live in infamy for many small business owners around the world due to their drastic loss in sales, the reason for this drop being, in one word, Panda. In today’s modern world, the internet is the key player in the success of a company, whether it is through online sales or online advertising, and the most influential aspect of the internet on the economy is indeed Google. 

How a website ranks on a Google search can determine if that website receives zero hits in an hour or a thousand hits, and the amount of hits that website receives determines its profit and its success. A few months ago, Google saw the need to update the algorithm they use to rank different websites and thus Panda was born. Panda is meant to remove things such as linkfarms, duplicate content, and spam web pages from the top of any Google search and they have achieved this however, they have also removed several reputable businesses from the highest rankings simply because they contain “poor content”. According to the post on Google’s own Webmaster Central Blog, they believe that their new algorithm “[…] has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality websites […]” which can be seen as true however, what is their answer to the small businesses which they have hurt? Google has offered several of the questions that they themselves used when ranking websites to the public so that anyone whose website took a drop in ranking can fix it, this list of questions can be found at the previous link. Google has taken this step and it is indeed a positive one in helping those who may have been wrongfully hurt by the Panda algorithm but still, the problem remains, especially for those who cannot afford to make the changes.

There has been a lot of talk lately about how small businesses are being affected and while that is important, it is also important to take into account how the consumers are being affected, how you and I being affected by Panda? As a result of the Panda algorithm, many small businesses are going unnoticed while large corporations and big name sites such as amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Sears are receiving more hits than ever as a result of their higher rankings over the small, local businesses on Google searches. The reasons behind this preference towards larger companies are fully explained here. Small, internet based businesses had enough of a challenge to compete with the large, name-brand companies pre-Panda but now, that challenge is even more difficult to overcome. Google defends Panda by saying that all a company has to do to fix there is to update the content on their websites however, this is a large and often painstaking task for many of these small, internet based business owners such as Mitch Lieberman, whose story can be found here as they are unable to hire the manpower required to have completely unique content for every single page of theirs. Ultimately, the impact on these small, internet based businesses will push consumers towards those companies whose webpage shows up on Google searches which will thus limit the public to shopping only at these “super-powers”. Panda is harming the economy by limiting the advertising that these internet dependant small businesses receive and, in the end, will only hurt consumers due to the lack of competition that will exist as small, internet based businesses slowly go extinct.