Google Panda
SEO Experts

Google Panda was released for the first time in February 2011. The main aim of Google Panda was to rank sites automatically by Google Panda to class them as being of higher quality above those that were considered to be of a low standard by Google Panda. Reports about Google Panda indicated that Google Panda dropped sites containing a high level of advertising to lower rankings by Google Panda while high traffic sites, such as news and social networks, rocketed up the Google Panda rankings. The rollout of Google Panda was not without its problems as somehow Google Panda assessed sites that contained original content and pushed them down the Google Panda rankings. Google Panda also had issues with assessing scraped content, and Google Panda also struggles with copyright infringing content.

Google then attempted to make Google Panda better by requesting users to submit relevant data points to Google Panda so that Google Panda would be better able to detect scrapers and apply this to the Google Panda rankings. Google Panda has since undergone several updates since it was initially rolled out and Google Panda was fully rolled out in April 2011. Google has accepted that Google Panda requires additional support and so has provided help for Google Panda on its blog. Therefore legitimate site owners aware of Google Panda now have some guidance to allow them to evaluate their site content using Google Panda compatible quality assessment metrics to improve their Google Panda ratings. The Google Panda help consists of 23 points relevant to Google Panda that someone can use to help then to develop a high-quality site as defined by Google Panda.

Google Panda uses artificial intelligence in a novel way that makes Google Panda truly the next generation ranking system. The Google Panda algorithm is more flexible in terms of its scalability and sophistication than anything that preceded Google Panda. Google Panda used human assessors to teach Google Panda about the quality measures of a website, which included Google Panda learning about factors such as the design of the site and Google Panda learned whether it contained high quality information that Google Panda could apply to a measure encouraging users to return to the site in the future. Google Panda then used what Google Panda had learnt to define the difference between a low and high quality website.

This active definition by Google Panda led to the use of multiple additional ranking factors by Google Panda over and above those that had been used in the past, this included Google Panda reducing the weighting of factors such as PageRank.

Google Panda continues to evolve and regular updates of Google Panda are carried out to ensure that searches are optimised as far as possible. Google Panda is now starting to reach an optimum point in its evolution and so the most recent updates are affecting smaller percentages of queries.

Google Panda is successful because it does not just take into account each individual page on a website. Instead Google Panda will assess sites as a whole, or broken down by section. In this way Google Panda can ascertain whether a website is a legitimate website with high quality content or a site that contains multiple pages of scraped content.

The long and short of it is that Google Panda has provided the tools for legitimate webmasters to ensure that Google Panda sees their web content as high quality and to minimise low ranking material.