One more aspect: a lot of PPC advertisers do not like to use network ads (i.e., partner sites) because they are perceived as yielding lower quality clicks. Clicks from Google itself are seen to be more likely to monetize for the advertiser.

This is a very good point. As users of Adwords become more familair with its abilities to customize campaigns, they can spend less and keep their same conversion rates.

For instance, only advertising at certain times of day, or certain keywords for specific regions, not advertising in specific geographical locations, the use of quotes and brackets in keywords, etc...

If Google ever does end up facing an anti-trust trial, your second point will likely form part of the case against them. This could be considered direct evidence that Google are using their dominance in search to favor their own properties over others.

This shouldn't have been downvoted; news of an FTC antitrust probe for /precisely this behavior/ was reported just last month: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230333990457640...

A few years ago they had an ad for Blogger, which was not actually an AdWords ad, shown if a search request contained a word "blog". It was placed above AdWords.

It's not illegal to use dominance in one market to enter another. That's called good business.

Antitrust requires monopoly, which google does not have. There are many competitive and successful ad networks and search engines, and there is no lock in to the search product.

I don't agree with the entire concept of anti-trust, let alone support any case against Google - but I can see it happening

Yeah, Standard Oil and U.S. Steel were pretty awesome.

Without robber-barons, we would have a dearth of philanthropists.

Bullshit.

Yes, some of the robber-barons were and are philanthropists.

But robbing to give it away is not much more moral than robbing to spend it yourself or give it to your heirs. Both are still theft.

For examples of modern non-robber philanthropists, see H & P, Buffet, et al.

What is Panda?

Changes that Google made, designed to reduce the number of "low quality links" in search results, such as those to content farms. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-qua...

Rather than being an algorithm change, it seems to be a process that Google runs only occasionally, which labels entire sites (rather than individual pages) as low quality. Sites with that label are penalized in search results.

It affected many sites, including those that aren't content farms (mine included,) in what many webmasters believe is collateral damage.

I've found many of the claims of collateral damage to be from sites that I don't honestly feel were adding much value to our lives, even if they weren't strictly content farms.

I'd be interested to hear your specific story?

My site that was penalized is The Online Slang Dictionary. http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ It's the oldest slang dictionary on the web and had the only freely accessible slang thesaurus on the web until about a month ago. In contrast to other slang dictionaries, The Online Slang Dictionary is only for legitimate slang words.

I've never used any black-hat or even slightly questionable SEO techniques or means to publicize the site. It started being penalized April 11, which is the launch date of what (IIRC) is being called "Panda 2.0". I've made many changes in hopes of fixing whatever it is that's causing Google to decide that the site is low quality, but haven't seen any improvement in ranking since then. A (now outdated) list of those changes is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2664346 .

Your website comes up as the 4th results for "slang dictionary". Where was it before panda?

#2. It's fallen in Google rankings for nearly every keyword for which it appears at all.

I guess my site was hit by Panda too.. I said guess because all of us are guessing since Google does not bother to inform us. Like you, searching for a keyword, previously lands you in the first page - now it's on the 4th/5th page.

Try searching your site on Bing, Yahoo and see..

videowatchr.com uses Google video search and the youtube API to show youtube videos. So of course, it will have duplicate content.

If you use an API, you are getting someone's content most likely, does that make you a content farm? How about if you use an RSS feed?

Google should publish guidelines on this Panda - so we're not guessing.

If @WalterGR above is correct, then changes to your site will only help when panda is rerun between one bot visit and the next (ie it's a batch process not a constantly evolved ranking).

If that's true then an awful lot of sites I have heard about may have been wasting time SEO'ing for nothing. (most obvious is serverfault)

Does anyone know if it really is an infrequent labelling run or an algoithm change and or it's run frequency?

Edit: reference to waltergr added correctly

Here's my collateral damage story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763272

There are definitely high quality sites that were hit by Panda.

An update of the Google algorithm earlier this year. It changed, in some cases quite radically, the search results.