Google’s Panda 4.2 Explained
On July, 18th, Google released Panda 4.2, their latest Panda algorithm update, and though some company sites haven’t felt the impact of this update, there are reasons to be informed of this change in regards to the future of your company.
This Google update is made to resist web spam and downgrade websites in the Google rankings that have repetitive or thin content. Meaning that Panda is zoning in on websites that show the same content as other sites and sites with very low content.
Based on the estimates that Google has provided on this update, it is said to affect about two to three percent of English language queries. Though the effects of this medium-sized update is likely not to be felt for several months for targeted sites.
To give you more insight into how Panda works, the Panda algorithms require updates, it works like a filter that collects sites that haven’t passed quality standards for months until at some point the update is rolled out and the data is refreshed. This data refresh applies the ranking demotion effects of the algorithm to all the sites that the Panda filter collected during this time. This update happens two or three times a year and the last update happened over 10 months ago.
This has proven to be a long wait period to see if your business site has passed Panda’s standards and especially for an ecommerce site, the length of time between updates can affect its business.
Presently, Google is working on speeding up the length of time between the updates, which will benefit company websites which have been penalized by these updates, though this also may mean that you can be penalized at any point. Meaning that there will be no milestone dates to which to pinpoint to the cause of performance changes.