Google Panda, launched in February 2011, is a relatively new development by the company to improve the search results ranking algorithm. It is named after the engineer Navneet Panda. Their goal is to show higher quality websites at the top of search results and keep ‘thin sites’ or low quality websites in the lowest ranking. It is a leak to show only good quality content at the top to improve the credibility of Google search more than any other search engine. According to a report, social media sites and newly launched websites rank higher on Google than those with a lot of ads. Through this change, about 12 percent of the ranking of all search results is affected. After the launch of Panda, Google’s webmaster forum and many other websites were filled with complaints from copyright infringers and scrapers that ranked higher than those 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 inception in February 2011, Google’s Panda has gone through many updates, and this happened on a global scale after about two months in April. A notice was posted on the Google blog that gave instructions on self-assessment of the quality of the website. Therefore, it was intended to help affected publishers solve the classification problem. The blog post had a list of 23 bullets that gave satisfactory answers to “What is considered a high-quality site?” It mainly focused on helping 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 on their quality, including speed, design, and reliability. With Google’s updated Panda, the machine learning algorithm was used to see similar aspects of various high-quality and low-quality sites. It resulted in a depreciation of the importance of PageRank, the old ranking factor. Today, several new ranking factors are 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 English-language search queries, 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 the individual pages of a website. This is a significant difference from the previous algorithms and Panda. Therefore, it has improved the way that Google search indexes sites.

Strict Google rules

In March of this year, Google Panda got an update and the company stated that it will implement an over-optimization penalty to fairly manage high competition on the web. Therefore, beware of all webmasters.