Google Panda was a major change to Google's search result ranking algorithm, first released in February 2011. The change was designed to downgrade "low-quality sites" or "thin content" sites, especially "content farms," and return higher-quality sites near the top of search results.
CNET reported that news sites and social networking sites saw a spike in telegram dating philippines rankings, while sites containing a lot of ads dropped in rankings. The change reportedly affected nearly 12% of search results rankings. Soon after Panda was introduced, many sites including the Google Webmaster Forum were flooded with complaints about crawlers/copyright infringers who were ranking higher than sites with original content. At one point Google publicly requested data points to help better detect crawlers.
In 2016, when the Panda algorithm was updated, Matt Cutts, who was the head of webspam at Google, commented: Panda caused a lot of loss to Google's revenue through some partners, and Google actually needed to disclose the significant impact of Panda in the earnings call. But I believe that launching Panda is the right decision, not only for the long-term trust of users, but also to provide a better ecosystem for publishers.
After the initial launch of Google’s Panda algorithm in February 2011, it went through several updates, and its impact spread around the world in April 2011. To help affected publishers, Google published an advisory report on its blog, which provides some guidance for self-assessment of website quality. Google listed 23 points on its blog that answer the question of what is considered a high-quality website? It is designed to help webmasters understand Google’s way of thinking. Since 2015, it has been incorporated into Google’s core algorithm.
The name Panda comes from Navneet Panda, a Google engineer who developed the technology that allowed Google to create and implement the algorithm.
Google Panda was first introduced in February 2011 as part of Google’s efforts to eliminate black hat SEO tactics and web spam.
At the time, users were already complaining more and more about the growing influence of “content farms.”
Along came the Panda algorithm for classifying the quality of pages, which was used internally and modeled after human quality ratings and used them as a ranking factor.
Fast forward to 2021, and you can now see how important it was for Google to focus on quality and user experience as its first step.
Here's everything you need to know about Google Panda - more about why it was launched, the algorithm you need to understand, and a full timeline.
Why Google created Panda
In 2010, the decline in the quality of Google's search results and the rise of the content farm business model became a recurring topic of discussion.
As Google's Amit Singhal later told Wired magazine at TED, the Caffeine update in late 2009 greatly accelerated Google's ability to index content quickly, but also introduced some not-so-good content into their index.
Google's Matt Cutts told Wired magazine that this new content problem is not really a spam problem, but rather, what is the least I can do to not become spam?
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