Since the Google Panda update in the US and the recent global roll out there has been a lot of buzz about the implication of site rankings.  It seems that sites that have non-aggregated original content prior to the update have lost significant rank to site scrappers, syndication websites and the like.  The question is becoming that if you have quality original content on your site, how would you rank below a site that has stolen and republished the same content without credits?

In an interview between Wired magazine and Google, Amit Singhal had this to say if you felt you were adversely affected:

Sites that believe they have been adversely impacted by the change should be sure to extensively evaluate their site quality. In particular, it’s important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site. Publishers who believe they’ve been impacted can also post in our webmaster forums to let us know. We will consider feedback from publishers and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms.

That is all well and fine, however now you are on damage control.  We posted a great article from SEOMoz earlier this week detailing out how eHow.com was adversely affected by the Panda update.   Below is a methodical article detailing out the post-Panda update effects and how, in this instance, it has adversely affected a site that has genuine UGC and a enormous archive of content.

A weird thing has happened as a result of panda. Something you might have expected Google’s Search Quality testers to catch before rolling the update out. Due to the domain-wide nature of the signal, high-quality, original content produced by the websites who were negatively impacted are now being ranked below the exact same content, republished by partners to whom they syndicate. Even more egregious, they are also being outranked by scrapers who effectively steal and republish the same content without permission or credit.

I have seen this briefly mentioned by observers, but I haven’t seen this phenomenon transparently documented either in SEO press or in the Panda Google forum. The purpose of this post is to transparently share data from the site WonderHowTo.com (of which I am the CTO) and locate others experiencing a similar phenomenon.

Pre Panda

For three years, we at WonderHowTo organized the sprawling world of HowTo with taxonomical zeal and very human curation. By January, we had grown to more than 10mm monthly uniques. As our community formed, we began to shift our efforts towards the concept of covering timely news in the HowTo space (there is astounding innovation each day among the 427 subcategories we follow).

Our journalistic cred grew, and at the beginning of the year, two fantastic syndication partners Business Insider, and Huffington Post recognized our quality and eagerly published our articles in their sections (primarily Technology). On occasion, we noticed that our articles were outranked by our partners, but over the course of a few days, Google always got it right, recognizing the source as WonderHowTo. For the record, pre-Panda, we cannot recall one instance when a scraper outranked us with our own content in Google. Never. There seemed to be order in the universe.

Post Panda

Our Google traffic fell by 40%. Among our 1 million indexed pages, we experienced plenty of displaced rankings. Before getting into the what, how, & why, one thing has stood out as alarmingly egregious: Original content created by us is no longer able to rise to the top above our partners or even scrapers who republish our content. Ever. Panda branded us the Rosa Parks of content, forcing us to the back of Google’s ranking bus, along with all the other sites which fit its profiling.

Read the entire article at: SEOMoz