With Knowledge Comes Power: Google Panda

What is Google Panda? How does it work? What does it do?

April 9, 2013

Google Panda,

As of February 23, 2011 Google has changed it search results algorithm. This was aimed for "low-quality sites" so that the ranking would return faster higher-quality sites for top search results. Sites that have a lot of advertising have a lower ranking. From this the rankings for these sites went up by twelve percent. After this many websites including Google's webmaster forum had complaints of copyright infringements getting better rankings than sites with original material. By that point Google had asked for data pointers to help be able to detect scrapers better. From then Google has gone through several updates since the original. Google Panda has been in full effect globally since April 2011. Google has set up a list that provides a series of bullets points answering questions such as, "What is a high-quality site". The process includes tests that include trustworthiness, speed, design, quality and whether or not the user should return to the web site. Some differences between Panda and other algorithms include ranking on the entire site than the actual individual pages themselves. Google Panda says that they want to make a level playing field.

Matt Cutts who is Google's head of search spam announced that their Panda algorithm will soon be more integrated into their algorithms that are overall continuous updates. That means that the Panda refreshes that people have been tracking will start to be less severe and noticeable to webmasters and SEOs. Panda updates will be more real time than the usual manual push out.