You all recall Google’s Panda; which went on to bring down a large number of sites it determined were ‘Content Farms’. This designation meant it was a crap site, publishing crap, and Google would treat the site itself as a Cow Pasture. That meant anything you published on a Content Farm would be treated as what is found at the bottom of your shoe if you walked through a Cow Pasture.

This, however, did not in anyway effect the crap being published, being decorated with Adsense gaining xyz hits, and rising to the top of a Google Search.

Google has gone back to the algorithm and tweaked it, creating the Penguin. which is designed to focus on two features, Keyword Stuffing and article spinning.

Keyword Stuffing means writing an article in which every sentence has the keyword but says nothing. Article Spinning is where one writes one article which it submits to a few dozen sites, often with different names and juggled paragraphs and adverbs.

Spinning an article is different from writing five or ten or twelve articles on the same topic but with a different focus and information.

For example; let’s suppose you wrote an article posted on Triond about the Salem Witch Trials a few years ago. Recently, coming across new information and from a different perspective you write a longer article and post it here. That would not be spinning as long as one had new information, not just paragraph 3 moved to position 5, paragraph 5 moved to First, and a sprinkling of replacement nouns, verbs and adjectives.

The Penquin is supposed to be able to catch spinning, and would only find one article. Hence the remaining 11 would be ignored.

How it will perform these acts is kept quiet, but let’s see if it has an effect on the quality of Internet publishing.