What the heck with Panda - content or links or both? ~ RANT !!!

Hi guys I am not much of an SEO but I wna ask a couple of questions

I was just going through some of the queries in Google Forums and everytime someone whined about lost rankings, I could see only 1 reason by arrogant Top Contributors - Your content is not of high quality, its normal, boring fluff of 500 words

Now I am assuming content is original and no grammar mistakes.

Now my doubt is how can Google judge the quality of content and tell if its low quality? Its just an algorithm. To me it just makes no sense

Only one possible stat that Google can use is Bounce Rate. Is Google assuming if BR is high (above 70-80 percent), it implies that the site is shitty and visitors are pissed off seeing the content quality and bounce off early? Does this mean I can buy 1 second traffic and throw it at my competitor and get it penalised for high BR even though content is nice?

Now talking about links. Its a fact that we obviously have no control over links. So how does Google tackle this? What if a site has both quality and shitty links?

Its indeed heart breaking to see stupid content farms like ehow with useless content still ranking. On one hand, Google complains how people are generating content farms and on the other we see sites like ehow for every other search term. (See this article how ehow and mohalo use this strategy to rank for everything adamsherk . com/seo/targeting-multiple-keyword-variations/)

Anyways talking about normal sites, to be honest it seems like Panda is penalising sites randomly. I am seeing sites with shitty and scraped content full of ads above the fold ranking.

Google has made it like a guess game where there are no specific rules

It seems like one should spend thousands of dollars on content generation and then hope that Google doesn't penalise it during next update?

So now how does an average webmaster tackle this situation?

Rant Over

Your suggestions and advices are welcomed.

Saturday night bump !

Google cannot judge how "good" content is unless they manually review it. The algorithm could only detect how unique it is. The google boards are worthless for getting any kind of accurate feedback on why a site is sagging in the rankings.

Well - to add rant to a rant - I think they grew too big for their own good and try to please shareholders more than care about search results...

Maybe it's time for a change? I remember go.com, excite, overture and a few others - they were THE THING in their time, they are not that hot now (at least not under their old name).

Still - unless you have a large number of devoted followers, were online forever and offer great customer service that brings a lot of "word of mouth" advertising (like I do on my main site - you still have to deal with g...

P.S. I think it belongs in lounge

When the algorithm sets off flags the pages are tested by employees of google.

I know because the bar here in ANN ARBOR, MI is under one of the google locations and all the employees come in here and buy lunch and I ask them.

Lol google going social. I got over 700,000 messages about my website on Facebook and that didn't do anything for SEO.

IMO requiring unique content on your website isn't always the case. E.g
myshopping it's the 97 ranked site in australia, and it's all duplicate content. or take eventfinder top 50 site in new zealand and also all duplicate content, not even spun, just scraped straight off.

database sites still work. I think the only difference is, your site has to actually be useful to the user. Google can measure this through the following factors (in order of importance, this is just a guess btw).

1. searchs for your exact match domain with no spaces in google, relative to your total traffic. This is proberbly the number 1 factor, as it shows your returning visitors, which is the biggest measure of quality.

2. bounce rate back to google for your landing pages

3. unique content. IMO unique content is only important if your building a shitty adsense blog with crappy content in a random niche that you dont care about.