Google Speaks More About The Farmer Update, AKA Panda Update

Mar 3, 2011 at 6:21pm ET by Matt McGee

In an interview with Wired magazine’s Steven Levy (who’s keynoting at our SMX West conference next week), Googlers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts speak more about the recent Farmer algorithm update.

One of the interesting things they say is that last year’s launch of the “Caffeine” indexing infrastructure played a role in upping the visibility of “shallow content.”

[Amit Singhal speaking] Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.

Cutts and Singhal reveal that Google calls the update “Panda” internally — something they told Danny Sullivan last week, but asked that the name stay off-the-record at the time. There’s also some more detail about the questions that Google had its non-employee “testers” use when reviewing the effects of the Farmer algorithm’s changes, and an interesting exchange when Levy mentions one specific site — Suite101.com — that didn’t feel it deserved to be hit by the update.

Here’s the full interview on Wired.com.

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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http://GrowMap.com Gail Gardner

Interesting that they want to put their internal name out there now after all the posts calling this the Farmer Update. Doing that after all the posts about the update are up calling it Farmer is a way to make it harder for people searching for information to find it.

Do you really believe that Google is trying to minimize collateral damage as the title of one of the posts you linked to says or are they just trying to passify those who are complaining the loudest?