Google Speaks More About The Farmer Update, AKA Panda Update

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.