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Google Panda: Misleading search engine visitors away from variety

Searching for tuna recipes we were getting frustrated that every single top 10 result was all from one site. Many with obvious SEO intent, mixing and matching titles “tuna recipes”, “best tuna recipes”, “best canned tuna recipes” etc. There was no variety at all. Duplicated lists of links galore (isn't that similar to link spamming?) 

So we searched for “tuna recipes on recipeland” and here's what searchers get:

Screenshot:

Every single top 10 link is to ask.com who scraped content from recipeland.com. Eventually the scraped content links to recipeland.com, and on the next page of results you finally find what we were asking for.

Can anyone explain why this is a good user experience?

It simply boggles the mind at how Google is misleading visitors away from numerous legitimate sites.

And recipe site aren't the only one being penalized. Numerous legitimate sites with valuable and relevant content are continuing to get sacrificed so that large corporate brands can pick up more traffic and gain more “trust”.

If there is anything we've learned in over a decade of cooking, reviewing and testing food products; it is 8 times out of 10 if you trust the brand, you get the lowest quality at the highest price. There are some great brands out there but they are few and far between. Small and local and you find much better produce, meats and packaged goods.

Comments

sean
Port Perry, Canada
 over 11 years ago

Follow-up: after posting to Google Webmaster forums with pointing this out, the very next day this search query now returns results as a search engine user would expect.