Google Panda 25 – rolled out in March

Many SEOs and webmasters felt a significant impact to their rankings.

Matt Cutts had previously stated that Google were going to launch a Panda update on the weekend of the 16th/17th March but for many people it arrived one day early.

As Google is yet to officially confirm this update, we do not know what percentage of search results will be have been affected.

Perhaps more interestingly, Google also announced that it was no longer going to announce Panda updates as the algorithm update is now going to be integrated into its normal indexing process.

What  does this mean for webmasters?

Firstly, Panda isn’t retiring any time soon – we just won’t know about it when it happens. It also means that any ranking factors Panda put at the forefront of SEO are now being integrated into Google’s main algorithm.

Let’s quickly take a recap of the content trinity at the heart of Google Panda:

• Low amounts of content
• Large amounts of duplicate content
• Large amounts of poor quality content

Since Panda 1.0, affected webmasters have had to work hard to ensure their website was high quality. Poor quality websites have found it increasingly difficult to rank well and many have had to take great steps to increase the quality of their website.