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Now that we’re firmly in the age of mobility, buying online through a computer may appear obsolete  for some consumers. With a click of a button on your smartphone (which is always on) or your tablet (which is always on standby), you can access your favorite online merchant from anywhere.

It appears though that of our mobile devices, tablets are taking a lead when it comes to e-commerce. This comes in spite of their rather recent re-introduction, marked by the iPad’s 2010 launch (previous attempts to make tablet PCs didn’t survive long enough to be remembered).

According to the results of a Forrester report published on Forbes Blog, 9% of online shoppers have a tablet device, and while they already have other mobile devices, including smartphones, their preferred method of shopping is (you guessed it) their tablet. And while the iPad ruled the tablets’ market for a while now, the debut of Android’s Honeycomb this past February brought a strong contender to the market with a stable and attractive tablet-optimized OS that is now available for all manufacturers to use on their new tablets (look out for highly anticipated devices from Amazon and Sony coming soon).

With all this kind of momentum gathering, one thing is certain… “t-commerce” is the next big thing.

Ai’s clients have witnessed the evolution of tablet visits firsthand. Between May 2010 and 2011, the iPad visits grew by 782% for one of our clients and by 433% for another, while those clients’ iPhone visits only grew by 146% and 99%, respectively. The iPhone has been out since 2005 whereas the iPad came out in 2010, but such explosive growth for the iPad makes it clear that the tablet, as a traffic and revenue source, cannot be ignored.

As Bill Siwicki of Internet Retailer put it, “If you haven’t already created an m-commerce site or a mobile shopping app, now is the time. It’s not too late.”

For more insight on how to optimize for the tablet wielding consumer, see Alex Schmelkin’s post Make Way for T-Commerce.

The war on low-quality content and content farming kicked into high gear last February when Google released “Panda”, an update to its complex ranking algorithm. According to Google’s official blog post “the update was designed to reduce ranking for low quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.” But as anyone in the field would expect, SEO pros and website owners immediately began debating the merits.

This change brought back memories of the uproar over the 2003 update “Florida” that took some of the highly ranked sites by storm. With “Panda” there were websites that were highly ranked before February 24 that became endangered overnight, some witnessing up to a 40% drop in traffic.

So is Panda fair?

Theoretically, yes. According to a May 6 post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, “More guidance on building high-quality sites,” the algorithm mirrors Google’s mantra that website owners should focus on building great sites, not trying to fool the search algorithm. The post includes some examples that seem easy to measure, like spelling errors or duplicate content. Other quality definers are being introduced periodically and in scattered places like the page loading speed, which wasn’t mentioned in the guide but available in a Google Analytics update post. Another clue is the author tag, which was posted on Google Webmaster Central. But other examples for defining a quality website appear dubious or highly subjective. How could an algorithm reasonably measure, for example, if an article includes “both sides of a story,” or if you’d “expect to see this article in a printed magazine or book”?

Putting theory aside, what really happened is that some of the sites that re-publish content outranked the original source of the content. Google responded to this issue with an update, Panda 2.2, that has been approved but not yet released.

With the stir the Panda algorithm update had caused, Google officials stated that this is just one out of 500 algorithm updates they are intending to roll out through 2011. Let’s hope the next update won’t be called “Dodo”.