Earlier this month, the 2011 SMX Advanced conference got underway in Seattle, and Day 1 ended with a much-anticipated question and answer session between Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Google’s search quality boss Matt Cutts. Unsurprisingly, the agenda was largely dominated by that now-notorious bear, the Google Panda. In fact, Sullivan began the interview by revealing a large toy panda bear seated at centre-stage; a clear message to search marketing agency owners that panda-monium won’t be dying down anytime soon!

Since the introduction of the Panda update (also dubbed the Farmer algorithm), the fur has really been flying, with many site owners complaining that they have been unfairly penalised for duplicate content and are now being outranked by low-quality scraper sites – the very sites Google hoped to strip of their authority. According to Cutts, the issue is being addressed with more changes and improvements to the algorithm, and his answer has effectively set the search industry abuzz with speculation about Panda 2.2; the roll-out is expected to occur any day now, and some online sources are even speculating that Panda 2.2 is already here. Regardless, most site owners have only one question on their minds; how does a site recover once it’s been pinned under the paw of Panda?

Following a bout of negative feedback concerning Google’s ability to filter out low-quality search results from content farms and identify it as spam, the iconic search engine has declared war on sites that exist purely for the purpose of generating links. By now, any SEO consultant will have heard of the “farmer algorithm”, Google’s latest update designed to reduce spam in search results. Of course, the burning question is, how will the search industry be affected?

According to Danny Sullivan, writing for SearchEngineLand, Google expects the change to impact approximately 12% of US search results, and eventually plans to roll out the algorithm update globally. And while most industry insiders have been picturing the wilting of metaphorical crops, Google won’t officially state that the changes are aimed at content farms. In fact, while industry news sources have dubbed it the “farmer” algorithm, Google refers to it as the “Panda”, named after one of the project’s key developers.

If you follow the heated rivalry between the world’s leading search engines, you’ll know that Microsoft Bing has been marketed as a “decision engine”, taking shots at rivals like Google with a series of comical advertisements highlighting the threat of “Search Overload Syndrome”.

Pretty amusing, but Google marketing professionals will agree that the latest dispute between Google and Microsoft Bing is no laughing matter. The industry has been abuzz since Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal accused Bing of lifting code from Google and copying their rival’s search results.

Ok, so finally Google Caffeine is up and at ‘em and in the few days there has been numerous posts on the effect that Google Caffeine will have on search. We know what Google Caffeine will mean for consumers, but what will it mean for the other side of the coin, SEO’s who produce content for individuals who require their current information to be as up to date as possible?

Basically, the most obvious benefit that will affect consumers, SEO’s and content owners is that documents will be able to be found seconds after they have been crawled. Google Caffeine is now offering a real time indexing system which is said to be “fresher” than ever before.

Many of us in the search industry already know that rankings are not the be all and end all, yet there are still so many people out there who are fixated on keyword rankings or that trophy phrase. I’m sure we have all seen the occasional article or blog post along these lines in the past; however, this topic gained renewed vigor last week after a presentation by Bruce Clay in which he stated “ranking is dead”.

Many people disagree with Bruce Clay’s statement, however, he possibly just used the wrong words at the time. I am in full agreement with what I believe was the true meaning/intention behind what he said. Most of us know that rankings fluctuate on a daily basis; different data centres produce different results, local queries differ from country to country and finally there are all the advances in personalised search.