If you haven’t heard by now, Google’s newest algorithm update, called “Panda,” has caused quite a stir- both negative, and positive, in their quest to continue to enhance a user’s experience by improving their search results. This newest wrinkle in the algorithm penalizes those sites with poor/shallow/low quality content.

Quite a few sites suffered significantly lower rankings- a number of them deserved it, but others did not.

A group of testers/users surfed the web and were asked to determine whether they considered a particular site to be authoritative, if it would be okay in a magazine, see if it has “excessive” ads, and a number of related questions. Google is mum on what all the questions might be.

“And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality,” Amit Singhal, one of Google’s top spokespersons is quoted as saying.

A more in-depth report is readable here on WebProNews.com.

Was your site adversely affected? Do you think these algorithm changes are fair?