With all the talk about the new panda update penalizing sites that have low quality content, I was surprised to find a very poor result in the first spot in Google for the key phrase [google buys beatmyquote] . Clicking on the link to a Smart Company result takes the user to a virtually blank page (apart from the ads and an excerpt). This page /Search.html?keyword=BeatMyQuote is clearly an auto-generated page that shouldn’t be indexed at all.

The link on this page points to an article about how Google penalized a site that it had just acquired for violating the company’s webmaster guidelines. Now considering with the above search, a user would most likely be looking for a news or blog post about Google’s recent acquisition of BeatThatQuote.com, this doesn’t seem to be the best result for a number 1 spot in Google.

More bad news for SEO specialists still concentrating only on organic results in Google (surely not….). It seems Big G is testing first page results with only 3 “normal” organic listings and 7 map integrated ones. Considering the map listings are appearing for more and more listings, this is going to make it even harder for us poor SEO guys!

Here are the screen-shots of the (at the moment beta) listings using a UK ip address: