A number of prominent UK technology news sites have seen their Google rankings drop substantially after the search engine rolled out its "Panda" update, intended to demote sites which scrape content from others, to the UK and other English-language Google users.
Well if your site is one that scraps a lot of content then I'm afraid its bad news for you, with your site plummeting in the rankings or disappearing altogether.
There are notable exceptions to this with a number of technology news websites, like UK based Tech Radar for example being affected and seeing their rankings drop. Interestingly Microsoft owned Ciao has also seen their site drop in the rankings as a result, with some speculating that this may have more to do with the fact they logged a complaint with the EC about Google using their monopoly unfairly. Highly unlikely but fun all the same!
The good news is that if you have been following standard SEO advice, of generating good readable content which your users enjoy, then you should see your rankings increase. This is because the new algorithm takes into consideration the amount of time a user spends on your site.
All in all a good upgrade I think, with sites with good original content getting a boost and the sites clogged full of scrapped content disappearing from the top of the search results.
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