In a post on Google+, Google’s Pierre Far announced the latest version of Google’s Panda update. How will this update affect the rankings of your web pages on Google? What can you do to make sure that your web pages get better rankings?
What is Google’s Panda update?
Google’s ‘Panda’ algorithm is a filter that Google designed to penalize web pages with thin or poor content. If the content of a website has been copied from other web pages, or if the content has very low quality, it won’t rank well on Google.
What’s new in the latest Panda update?
Here’s Pierre Far’s official announcement:
“Earlier this week, we started a slow rollout of an improved Panda algorithm, and we expect to have everything done sometime next week.
Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.
Depending on the locale, around 3-5% of queries are affected.”
What does this mean for your website?
1. If your website was penalized before
If your website was penalized by the last Panda update, your rankings might recover if you have changed your web pages in the meantime.
If your rankings recovered by October, 5th, you made the right changes. If not, you have to improve the content of your web pages.
2. If your website was not penalized before
If your website statistics show a significant traffic drop from Google, it might be that Google’s new algorithm decided that your website content was not good enough.
In that case, you have to improve the content of your web pages to get better rankings.
Google’s Panda algorithm targets websites with low quality content. If you have a real website with real content, you don’t have to worry about this update.
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