It was expected - on November 5th, Google added its latest Panda Update to its search engine algorithms. This led to a slight shaking up of the Google results, as there was a worldwide impact on about 0.4% of inquiries, and 1.1% of those inquiries in the United States in the English language. As the 21st Panda Update, it fell into Google’s usual trend of releasing an update every four to six weeks.
The 0.04% impact is lower than many other updates - the first Panda Update in February of 2011 saw an almost 11% impact on searches, and was rolled out in English in the US only. The last upgrade was done at the end of September of this year, and had an effect on 2.4% of inquiries in English.
Panda Updates are changes to the ranking algorithm Google uses to rank pages on its search engine. It is aimed to lower the rank of low quality or “thin” sites that are key word dense but do not feature actual important content. They help Google to provide its users with more relevant results, but also hurt the SEO of sites that didn't continuously update high-quality content. The first Panda update caused a surge in the rankings of news websites and social networking sites, as it looked for sites that are regularly updated and provide a great deal of content, and saw a lowering in the rankings of websites dense with advertisements.
Soon after the first Panda Update occurred, Google was flooded with complaints of websites with copyright infringements ranking hire than sites that had originally posted the content. This is why Google has continued to upgrade the process, and rolled out its other 20 upgrades over the last year and a half.
If you are worried that the Panda Updates may be having an effect on your website’s rankings, contact Sales & Marketing Technologies today. We can help evaluate your website and making sure you are providing the right content to receive high rankings on Google.