Since the launch of the Google Panda update, many people who work at home are debating on their priorities how to allocate their work efforts- Concentrate on creating new quality content to their sites or focusing on fighting many scrapers that stealing their contents. In a new video, Google’s Matt Cutts is trying to assist with this question.

The Connection Between Panda and Scrapers

Before i elaborate on Matt’s answer, let me explain why it can be pretty damaging when someone is copying your content. The Panda (ongoing) algorithm update is targeting among other things, duplicate content on different sites. Therefore, whenever someone is scraping your content, you might be Pandalized if Google fails to identify your page as the original one (which apparently happens a lot)!

Consequently, although the Panda did downgraded significantly duplicate content pages, it also started a massive war between webmasters and content scrapers. In Google’s favor i can say that they are always trying to improve their algorithm to identify the original content page, They even developed a special form where webmasters can report scrapers directly to Google.

Creating Content Or Fighting Scrapers?

Back to Matt Cutts, his advice is to concentrate on the quality of your own site, meaning adding fresh unique quality content and improving poor ones. Matt acknowledges that there are cases where scrapers appears in the search results, but he also mentioned that Google is always trying to find and fix problems that relates to scrapers.

What i found interesting, is that he is saying that Google “actually have good stuff in the pipeline that i am pretty excited about”. It could mean that another interesting meaningful algorithm update as a part of Panda or a whole separate one, can be at our doorstep soon, that will target specifically the scrapers (hopefully efficiently).

Matt stating that the root of the issue (if you have been affected by the Panda update) isn’t the scrapers, but is that Google thinking your site’s content (or part of it) isn’t quality enough. When focusing on creating the best quality content as possible on your site, you don’t have to be worry as much about the scrapers.

The last thing i want to point out from the video, is that Matt saying that you need to improve (or delete) even small parts of your site that have especially low content, suggesting that even few poor pages can affect your whole site’s rankings.

Here is the full video: