Google Launches New Panda Update

Four months since Google released Panda 4.0, the search engine giant announced the roll out of its latest version this morning.

Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google UK, said in a blog post that a new Panda update – the 27^th since 2011 – has been released. Google’s Head of Webspam team Matt Cutts also confirmed the release via Twitter.

Farr mentioned that this latest update is expected to be more precise in identifying low-quality content than the other versions. He wrote that “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.” As per the announcement, the “slow rollout” started earlier this week, and will continue until sometime next week before being complete.

Google Panda is one of Google’s major algorithms, designed to target sites with low-quality content and to provide better rankings for sites with high-quality, original content. The search engine elaborated on its function by saying that they depend on the high-quality content created by “wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem.” Google believes it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, “and that’s exactly what this change does.”

In May 2014, Google released Panda 4.0, which was reported to affect a healthy 7.5% of English search queries. It also saw about 30 to 70% decrease in traffic for a number of leading websites, including eBay online sellers. However, with the release of Panda 4.1, Farr noted that around 3 to 5% of queries will be affected, depending on their location.

A site affected by Panda 4.0 now has a chance to emerge if required site alterations have been made. Nonetheless, this also means that low-quality sites missed by the past update might get affected by Panda 4.1.

What do you think of Google Panda’s latest update? Do you think Panda 4.1 will affect your site?

Hit us up with a comment!

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