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Posted by Sanket Patel
May 23, 2014
It’s out of the cage. The new Panda 4.0 has been released by Google and it is significant to all of us.
What is Panda?
Initially released as the “Farmer Update’, the Panda algorithm was released in February 2011. The main motive of this algorithm update was to demote/penalize the pages with poor content and spam from the search engines.
The History of Panda Algorithm
• Panda 1: Feb 24, 2011 Impacted 12% of US results
• Panda 2: April 11, 2011 Affected 2% of the US queries
• Panda 3: May 10, 2011 No change was announced
• Panda 4: June 16, 2011 No change was announced
• Panda 5: July 23, 2011 No change was announced
• Panda 6: Aug. 12, 2011 Non-English queries up to 6-9% were affected
• Panda 7: Sept. 28, 2011 No changes were announced
• Panda 8: Oct. 19, 2011 2% queries affected
• Panda 9: Nov. 18, 2011 < 1% of queries were affected
• Panda 10: Jan. 18, 2012 No change was given
• Panda 11: Feb. 27, 2012 No figure of affected results was given
• Panda 12: March 23, 2012 Approximately 1.6% of queries saw the impact
• Panda 13 April 19, 2012 No change given
• Panda 14: April 27, 2012 No change was given
• Panda 15: June 9, 2012 Affected 1% of the queries
• Panda 16: June 25, 2012 About 1% of the queries were affected
• Panda 17: July 24, 2012 About 1% of queries were affected
• Panda 18: Aug. 20, 2012 Again almost 1% of queries were affected
• Panda 19: Sept. 18, 2012 Less than 0.7% of queries were affected
• Panda 20: Sept. 27, 2012 2.4% English queries were affected
• Panda 21: Nov. 5, 2012 1.1 % in U.S. and 0.4 % worldwide were affected
• Panda 22: Nov. 21, 2012 0.8% of English queries were affected
• Panda 23: Dec. 21, 2012 1.3% of English queries were affected
• Panda 24: Jan. 22, 2013 1.2 % of English queries were affected
• Panda 25: March 15, 2013 No news about its release
How effective is the newest Panda update?
The fourth Panda update seems to be a major one, which follows after a number of smaller, monthly refreshes. However, this new update is slated to be softer and gentler that its predecessors. The Panda 4.0 will serve the purpose of providing a base for future adjustments to the algorithm.
What will Panda 4.0 target?
All low-quality content sites are going to be demoted and if rumor-mill is to be believed, almost 7.5 queries have been affected. In order to provide the searchers with the best quality sites, the Panda as usual, will work towards providing high quality content to the users by targeting scraper sites.
The update will also target spammy queries like the payday loans that will make it very tough for the webmasters to recover from the heavy loss.
The payday loans refresh, along with the Panda may have a larger impact on low quality sites thus proving to be a double blow for many sites.
The Main focus
As forecasted, the update mainly is concerned with the content department. Having a look at the sites that lost their rankings considerably, these were the sites that ranked with the information from external sources, 1software’s, or pric-product comparison websites.
Google has told that Panda 4.0 will affect the queries of different languages at different degrees. Thus the affected English queries at 7.5 degrees might be noticeable by the user.
The Trouble for the Webmasters
The release of two updates at short intervals has made it very tough for the webmasters to figure out the changes and what has been targeted with these algorithm updates. It might also pose a challenge for the webmasters to know what changes should be done in order to recover from the search rankings.
Conclusion:
We will definitely get to know more in the coming days as the webmasters and online marketers will analyse the reasons behind a site’s rise or fall. Looking at how Google released the payday loans and the Panda 4.0 updates together, it will be no wonder that Penguin 4.0 may be released soon.
