Google is at it again with another Panda update, unofficially termed Panda 4.1 by industry experts. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far announced on Google+ last week that a new Panda update was scheduled to roll out this week. The roll out is expected to be completed by the end of the week.
From Pierre’s post: “Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small-and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.”
Depending where you’re located, 3-5% of search queries are being affected by the update.
The good news about the update is this update provides a larger variety of small and medium sized high-quality sites that are ranking higher. If your site was penalized by the previous Panda 4.0 update and you’ve made all the right moves to correct any issues your site may have had, your site will likely see an increase in visitor traffic by the end of this week.
Like all Google algorithm updates, there are winners and losers. If Panda didn’t hurt your site before, this most recent update gives it another chance to review your site with a different lens and penalize your site if it perceives low quality or poor content. If you notice a sharp or dramatic drop in website traffic by the end of this week, likely Panda 4.1 is the cause.
The update reinforces Google’s mantra that good quality content with clear and direct messaging are still a priority in importance for web visitors and Google. Reducing thin content, properly defining web page crawl priority and XML sitemaps are accurate in Google’s eyes should continue to be priorities for SEO experts. Also, make sure your site doesn’t have sitemap conflicts and has correct URL parameters and robots.txt commands.
In a nutshell, marketers who continue to push out poorly written or thin content will likely see their website rankings fall, along with the amount of traffic their website receive. Google has not been shy about that fact that they reward and want websites to have high-quality content that benefits the site user or reader. So this update is not a surprise, but instead another reinforcement stick of Google’s to make sure websites have visitor’s best interests in mind.
