Google Panda, launched in February 2011, is a relatively new development by the company to improve the ranking algorithm for search results. It is named after the engineer, Navneet Panda. Its goal is to show higher quality websites at the top of search results and keep “thin sites” or low quality websites in a lower ranking. It is filtering to show only good quality content at the top to improve Google search credibility more than any other search engine. According to a report, newly launched social media sites and websites rank higher on Google than those with lots of ads. Through this change, about 12 percent of the ranking of all search results is affected. After the release of Panda, the Google webmaster forum and many other websites were filled with complaints from copyright infringers and scrapers who ranked higher than sites that have 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 website quality self-assessment. Therefore, it was intended to help affected publishers resolve the ranking issue. The blog post had a list of 23 bullet points that provided satisfying answers to “What counts as a high-quality site?” It is primarily 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 were 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 being 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 differs 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. Therefore, 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 web masters.