Did you notice any sudden movement in your website’s ranking recently? If so, then, it might have been affected by the latest algorithm update from Google. It doesn’t have a new name, but rather, it’s one of Google’s most influential “animal”— the Panda.
What’s interesting about this update, according to Jennifer Slegg of SEMPost, is that it is “’baked in’ to the Google core algo, and not a spam filter applied after the core did its work.” This is not surprising because since it was released five years ago, it was meant to roll out slowly for a really long time.
There are rumours that it will become part of the core algorithm, and on January 8, 2015, a Google spokesperson confirmed this. Google says that “Panda is an algorithm that’s applied to sites overall and has become one of our core ranking signals. It measures the quality of site. Panda allows Google to take quality into account and adjust the ranking accordingly.”
In his article for Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz said that “we will never see another Panda update like we did in the past because it will run with Google’s main core algorithm.” This means that quality of the content will be paramount for all websites. The Google Panda update was introduced on February 2011 primarily to weed out sites with poor quality content.
Additionally, Google stated that websites should focus on creating the best possible new content and providing solutions to what the searcher is looking for. Mat Southern of Search Engine Journal puts it in a very clear perspective — that Google is focusing on quality, not quantity.