Keys to Understanding Google Panda

What is Google Panda?
If you’re involved in the search engine niche, you’ve heard of Google Panda. If you’re not, you probably just clicked this article because you think pandas are adorable. In either case, you’re already being affected by changes to Google’s search engine codenamed “Google Panda.”


The Skinny on Search Updates
Several years ago, the quality of search engines results started to noticeably decline. A lot of the results were sites that usually offered little informational value – like EzineArticles or eHow – or sometimes no informational value at all, just worthless content that was written by a computer and unreadable or simply plagiarized another site like Wikipedia.

Google took action, making three major changes to its search engine algorithm since Feb. 24, 2011. The first, Panda 1.0, targeted thin or shallow content, downgrading the search engine rankings of major content farms like About.com and EzineArticles. About 12% of all websites were affected by this change, most noticeably large sites that got downgraded and small sites that got a boost. The second algorithm update, Panda 2.0, was implemented on April 11, expanding the Google Panda algorithm, which was previously U.S. only, to the rest of the English language results on Google. Since then, bi-weekly updates of the Panda algorithm has brought us to Panda 2.5 which has included additional signals that Google uses to differentiate between high-quality and low-quality sites.