Google Panda Update 2.3 is officially out and Search Engine Land has got a confirmation from Google that Panda Filter had been updated slightly in the last week by the search engine giant. This update was pushed in just 5 weeks after its scheduled Update 2.2 which came up officially on June 16, 2011. Google has been updating Panda on a regular basis which shows the commitment they intend to have for their users who would get access to high quality sites.
Panda as known to everyone, or almost everyone, is an algorithm which fights against a website’s duplicate content. Panda focuses on declining the rankings of those websites which have poor content on their websites which may be either copy content or low quality content. This can affect the ranking of even the high quality sites which may have poor content on their websites. Panda may be a new ranking factor but looking at it with an overall perspective, it is not actually a completely new algorithm for overall ranking which has come out of Google’s warehouse.
A spokesperson for Google stated that Google comes up every year with 500 changes approximately which pertain to their ranking algorithms and the latest update relating to Panda was one of them. For quite some time, there have been complaints in this regard posted on threads and forums which even include the WebmasterWorld‘s thread which has racked up many replies. Google said that earlier they were of the thought that the complaints were related to Panda’s rolling updates which were assumed to have come out of Google’s workstations but actually they were pushed in manually. But they have now realized that these updates have been rolling out still on a manual basis.
Google added further that these manual updates differentiated between low and high quality websites which were on the basis of a few new signals incorporated in the manual updates. This led to increasing the ranks of a few sites which came up after this update was made.
Google has been improving Panda on a regular basis which can be seen from their scheduled dates posted below. It shows that more or less on a monthly basis Google had scheduled an update. It has even managed to officially launch the updates which were sometimes just before the scheduled dates or sometimes just after those dates. They have actually made it a trend to come up with an update regularly.
Each and every update of Panda has just improved from their earlier running update. But it has not been affirmative for everyone as there has been a drop in traffic for a few sites too. If one hopes to fix Panda problems, he would be unsuccessful as it wont help till there is another update pushed in.
Panda’s recent update has a few ranking factors which keeps in mind basically a few points. These points include low quality content, poor quality pages (which could even be removed), user experience and page templates. The update does not stop here. The high quality websites come into focus after these points are done with. For high quality sites, the update focuses on awareness and engagement which could be via social media and a few more channels. But the manual updates might tend to modify the effects to some extent.
However these manual updates bring back memories of ‘Google Bomb’ which was yet another algorithm which had manual updates.