Google recently updated it’s algorithm to punish sites with low quality and duplicate content. Some  have seen traffic to their websites drop severely.

Have you checked your website traffic statistics lately? You may be in for a surprise. If you have strived to deliver good, well organised information you may be a winner. Or not. Some people have observed some degradation of search results, causing panic and anger among many online.

The main issue is duplicate content as a punishable offence as many honest content creators have their words “scraped” or “lifted” from their websites and copied all over the internet. In these cases Google will be punishing the original content author, as seems to be the case with the latest update. On the other hand the claim is being made that people who have invested time and effort into paid SEO are being rewarded with higher rankings post-panda… which would seem contrary to Google’s intention of ensuring it can’t be “gamed” into displaying higher results.

Our stance, which has always been the same, is that you shouldn’t worry too much about this background noise and concentrate on making your website as great as possible for the user, while paying due credence to “good practice” to make it easy for a google robot panda to read and understand your website. Using good meta data, alt tags, keywords and staying away from flash for example.

If you want to read Google’s “official” take on the matter go read their blog post here : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html I’d tell you myself. But apparently Google don’t like duplicate content 😉 – zen10