You can’t have missed the buzz about Google’s Panda update in the UK today, which the company describes as an “algorithmic improvement designed to help people find more high-quality sites in search”. We’re now starting to see the biggest winners and losers in the search stakes, which appears to imply that “skinny content” sites, such as voucher code sites and some review websites, have fallen victim to Panda, while quality content sites, such as online newspapers and other sites where people spend a lot of time – like ebay.co.uk – have been rewarded.

So what does this mean for online PR professionals and content marketing? In a nutshell, it’s great news! We can continue to do what we should be doing anyway: creating compelling, engaging, optimised content that can be shared online and will keep people on the site reading, watching or listening for as long as possible.

Where does this leave article marketing?

I’ve often cited article hosting sites as a good back-up to place content, especially from a “long-tail” search perspective (ie. “Ten top tips on X, Y, Z”, or “How to do X, Y, Z”), but the likes of eHow.com and ezinearticles.com have taken an absolute pummelling, according to Searchmetrics’ findings.

Quality content-rich sites where people spend time, leave comments and share content etc should be fine, so placing content on Slideshare.net and engaging in online video marketing (YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion were all cited as “winners”) is clearly the way forward.

I’d recommend everyone familiarises themselves with Google’s own guidelines on how to improve the searchability of your website, and long live quality content!

[Disclosure: The company which carried out the winners/losers research, Searchmetrics, is a client]