Google Panda in a nutshell

Google Panda, launched in February 2011, is a relatively new development by the company to improve the search results ranking algorithm. It is named after the engineer, Navneet Panda. Their goal is to show higher quality websites at the top of the search results and keep “thin sites” or low quality websites ranking lower. It is a filtration to show only good quality content at the top to improve the search credibility of Google more than any other search engine. According to a report, social networking sites and newly launched websites rank higher on Google than those that have a lot of ads. Through this change, around 12 percent of the rankings of all search results are affected. After the release of Panda, the Google webmaster forum and many other websites were flooded with complaints from copyright infringers and scrapers that ranked higher than sites with original content. To combat this serious problem, Google tried to better detect violators by publicly requesting a data point.

Improvement in Panda

Since its creation in February 2011, Google’s Panda went through many updates, and this happened on a global scale after about two months in April. A notice was posted on the Google blog giving instructions on self-assessing the quality of the website. Therefore, it was intended to help affected publishers resolve the ranking issue. The blog post had a list of 23 bullet points providing satisfying answers to “What counts as a high-quality site?” It was mainly focused to help webmasters.

How does Panda work?

Google Panda is created through an algorithm update, which uses artificial intelligence in a more measurable and sophisticated way than in the past. With the help of human quality raters, thousands of websites have been rated based on their quality, including speed, design, and reliability. With Google’s updated Panda, a machine learning algorithm was used to see similar aspects of various high- and low-quality sites. It resulted in a depreciation of the importance of PageRank, the old ranking factor. Today, several new ranking factors are introduced to Google. Panda is updated frequently and Google runs the algorithm regularly.

google penguin

The Google Penguin Update was introduced on April 24, 2012. It affected an additional 3.1% of all search queries made in the English language, further highlighting that search rankings are highly volatile. On September 18, 2012, Google confirmed the latest version of Panda on its official Twitter page.

How Panda is different from other algorithms

Google Panda affects the ranking of the entire site or a particular segment rather than just individual pages of a website. This is a significant difference in the previous algorithms and Panda. Thus, it has brought an improvement in the way Google search indexes sites.

Google’s strict rules

In March this year, Google Panda was updated and the company stated that it will implement an over optimization penalty to fairly manage the high competition on the web. So, beware of all webmasters.