This morning I was searching for some authority information on how to increase the size of the P elements in HTML, and I received the search above. The third featured website is a page on exercises to increase the size of my P*nis. This is clearly not what I am looking for, or maybe Google has become more of a prediction engine. “Looking for basic HTML information? You must clearly be lacking somewhere”.
This is clearly a sign of the decline in the quality of search information Google is producing.
We have talked before about instances where the quality of Google’s search has declined. A scout through several SEO and marketing related searches shows that there is a large number of one page websites in the top ten search that have nothing to do with marketing or SEO.
Blame it on the Panda
The Panda update was supposed to target low quality websites that had a lot of plagiarised information. However the downside to the update was that negative factors affected the whole domain, not just the pages. The upside was that for most people they never had to see another article site or eHow page ever again. This is probably a good thing. However the downside is that some websites that offered some good information, like Dani Web for instance, got hit because they had low quality information elsewhere (we think, the jury is still out on this).
The only good news for Google is that Bing is having the same problem, because three of the top 10 queries are about breasts or P*nis. Also, we have no proof that this was not happening before the update, although we doubt it, because someone else would have mentioned it.
The bad news for Google
Google’s share of the search market is declining. Over the last few months it has fallen by 2%. This will continue if they keep serving up search queries like the ones we have mentioned. People will start looking elsewhere for their search. There are claims that Bing is improving their search quality, as it only can.
Is Google going to fix or even reverse the changes of the last few months? For their own sake we can only hope.