THE GOOGLE PANDA UPDATE • ONE YEAR LATER

Google announced its first-ever penalty targeting content deemed “thin” or “not good enough” on Feb 24, 2011 known as the Panda Update. It has caused some Publishers to seriously think about how to produce better material.

WHAT IS THE PANDA UPDATE?

Panda is a filter that lets Google sift out content deemed to lack substantial substance.

Panda is called an “update” because the filter runs periodically. Each time it runs, all the content Google knows about is resifted. Improved content escapes the filter, poor content gets caught again.

The process was dubbed Panda after the Google employee who created the filter. Panda is just one of more than 200 factors Google uses to rank pages

THE BEAST UUNLEASHED In the US.

The first Versiom of Panda, released on February 2011, especially targeted “scraper sites” that copied content wholesale from other sites and material produced on what many call content farms. Google said 12% of searches in the US Were Impacted

What is a content farm? A site Where content is copied from other sites, Often a site employing many writers who create content especially aimed to match popular searches. Quality can range from
excellent to very poor.

PANDA 2.0 SPEAKS MORE THAN US ENGLISH

PANDA Update 2.0, released April 2011, rolled out to handle all English-language queries. The new update includes searches from both English-speaking countries, e.g. British, google.co.uk, and Australian, Google.com.au, users, and queries in English from non-English countries (e.g. a searcher who has chosen English-language results using google.fr) Every Month after Panda 2.O went live Google continued to make minor changes. and the update began to have a monthly schedule.

PANDA 2.4 PANDA goes INTERNATIONAL

Joining the ranks of Panda are all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Whereas Panda hit 12% of U.S English-language searches, only 6%-9% of non-English searches were affected by 2.4.

With previous Panda updates Were released, sites were either hit or not, all at once.

With Panda 2.5 Google warned of “flux” where it might make Make Mini Updates that might catch or release some sites a few days after the main release.

PANDA 3.0 THE UPDATE FEW NOTICED

In October Google quietly released Panda 3.0. There was no blog post, and it seemed to Impact relatively few publishers. But after the fact, Google said this was a major update but shed no light on what it had changed to the filter.

A YEAR OF PANDA

• Panda Update 1 Feb. 24, 2011 > Seven Weeks
• Panda Update 2.0 April 11, 2011 > Four Weeks
• Panda Update 2.1 May 10, 2011, > Five Weeks
• Panda Update 2.2 June 16, 2011 > Five Weeks
• Panda Update 2.3 July 23, 2011 > Three Weeks
• Panda Update 2.4 August 12, 2011 > Seven Weeks
• Panda Update 2.5 Sept. 28, 2011 > Three Weeks
• Panda Update 3.0 October 19, 2011 > Three Weeks
• Panda Update 3.1 November 18, 2011 > Eight Weeks
• Panda Update 3.2 January 18, 2012 > ?

WHO SUFFERED FROM THE PANDA UPDATE?

Companies like Sistrix and SearchMetrics tried to assess this with “visibility Reports” While some companies that were hit acknowledged it with plans to improve.

• About.com said In April it experienced “moderately negative impact on pageviews due to Panda”
• Yahoo retired its Associated Content that was hit by moving the best content a new Yahoo Voices site
• Demand Media began efforts to diversify its content beyond search engines and create better quality material

Sites that continue to provide solid content will not fall through the Panda filter. Panda is a site-wide Penalty If enough pages are tagged as poor, the entire site is subject to Panda, though some good pages will continue to rank. to lose the penalty, remove or improve poor quality content. If Changes work, you should see Iraffic increase after the Panda update is released