Google Panda — that’s the subject of this lesson. What is Google Panda and how does it work? What are its main updates and how did they show up in the search results? Why does Google Panda still matter today? How did it change the way Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is done? There’s a lot to get through.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to ranking on search engines. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you want to understand how Google Panda works so you can adapt your SEO strategy.
So let’s not hold back any longer — here we go!
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What is Google Panda?
Google Panda is the official name of one of the most important updates to the Mountain View company’s general algorithm (Hummingbird). Before it took the name of the engineer who led its development, Navneet Panda, marketers referred to this update as the Google Farmer Update. That name points straight at the reason it launched in February 2011 (though in Italy its effects were only felt in August 2012).
Why was it created?
The Google Panda algorithm is a filter created to sift content farms out of the more than 100 billion documents in Google’s index.
Content farms are short pages of low-quality content produced in large numbers (often by sites, portals and news aggregators for the sole purpose of carrying paid ads).
Thanks to grey and black hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text and cloaking, this spam content sometimes stopped quality content climbing the SERPs.
For those reasons, in 2016 Google officially announced that Panda had been folded into Hummingbird.
Image from searchengineland.com
Which SERP problems does it solve?
Beyond the content farms already mentioned, the various refreshes and Google Panda updates that followed over the years focused on tackling:
- Thin content: content made up of short text carrying little information.
- Duplicate content: here the reference isn’t to a page containing more or less extensive parts identical to another text, but to redundant content on one specific topic. John Mueller himself clarified this, reiterating that Panda aims to encourage unique, original content capable of bringing real value to the user.
- Low-quality content: content that brings the user no value because the topic is treated shallowly and/or the page is stuffed with links.
- Lack of authority/trustworthiness: content produced by sources not considered reliable or verified.
- Low-quality user-generated content (UGC): short content, careless about grammar and form, of little informational value, created by users.
- Low-quality machine-generated content: content with the characteristics of poor UGC but produced by machines.
- Sites blocked by users: sites blocked by users in search engines or through browser extensions such as Chrome’s are a sign of low page quality.
- Broken links: links pointing to a resource that no longer exists.
- Unoptimized pages: all the SEO optimizations we’ve covered in the Academy lessons.
How does Google Panda work?
What’s the “mechanism” Google Panda uses to reward sites with fresh, quality content and clear the SERPs of the problems described above?
Google Panda, in combination with other Google algorithms such as PageRank, assigns each page a score (from 1 to 10), a “quality score”.
That’s a value calculated by analysing certain signals or factors (there are thought to be more than 200, with some 10,000 sub-signal variations – more here) that Google’s learning system relates to the quality of a piece of content.
Both the quality score and the signals feed the calculation of relevance and authority, the variables Google’s algorithm uses to set the order of content in the SERPs. To date only three ranking factors have been acknowledged or announced as such by Google: links, content and RankBrain.
How Panda works, explained by Google
On 3 March 2011, at the annual TED conference, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts of Google, interviewed by Wired, explained how Panda works and how developing the algorithm involved comparing various ranking signals against the ratings users gave to quality content.
In other words, Google’s learning system takes into account not only the signals it detects itself, but also how users judge the quality of a page or site against certain criteria.
What are those criteria?
They weren’t spelled out in the interview, but shortly afterwards Amit Singhal, Google’s head of research, published a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog titled More guidance on building high-quality sites. In it, Singhal set out 23 questions that amount to a guideline, or a checklist, for judging the quality of your own site.
Here are the questions:
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research or original analysis?
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in the search results?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Is the site a recognised authority on its topic?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- For a health-related query, would you trust information from this site?
- Would you recognise this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail, or less so?
- Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
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Google Panda & SEO
With the arrival of Google Panda, marketers and SEOs were forced to rethink how they created content. A few months after its release (23 February 2011), the Google Panda algorithm update had affected more than 12% of English-language search results.
The following year, in the United States alone, lost SERP positions cost the major “content farms” — About.com, Demand Media and Yahoo Associated Content — millions of dollars.
It was clear straight away that SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing and article marketing, intrusive advertising and writing text thin on real information had had their day.
How do you recover from a Google Panda penalty?
Google Panda changed the code, and the logic, of the Google algorithm, and it’s widely held that recovering positions after being hit by Panda or Penguin is very hard.
Here are some of the most widely used and recommended Panda recovery tactics:
- Content quality: make sure your content doesn’t display one or more of the problems described above, the ones common to content farms.
- Review your content and make sure there aren’t too many ads or affiliate links.
- Make sure your content matches users’ search intent exactly.
- Remove or rework duplicate content.
- Use the nofollow or noindex tags to keep duplicate or otherwise problematic content out of the index.
Beyond those there are others set out by Amit Singhal in the Google Webmaster Central blog post mentioned earlier.
The tactics, or advice, are these:
- Remove, merge or improve low-quality content into pages that bring the user real value, or move it to a different domain.
- Keep optimizing your site with the questions from that post in mind.
Google Panda: updates and refreshes
Between 2011 and 2015, Google Panda saw 30 refreshes or updates, summarised here in chronological order:
- 23 February 2011: Panda 1.0 –> the algorithm is released.
- 11 April 2011: Panda 2.0 (#2) –> the first update after release, hitting English-language queries worldwide. It brings in additional signals, such as sites blocked directly by users through a Chrome extension.
- 9 May 2011: Panda 2.1 (#3) –> initially called Panda 3.0; Google later clarified it was only a data refresh.
- 21 June 2011: Panda 2.2 (#4)
- 23 July 2011: Panda 2.3 (#5)
- 12 August 2011: Panda 2.4 (#6) –> international. The algorithm rolls out in all English-speaking countries and beyond, except Japan, China and Korea.
- 28 September 2011: Panda 2.5 (#7) –> Panda-related flux. Another update affecting English-language sites; Italy and Europe are excluded.
- 5 October 2011: Panda 3.0 (#8) –> flux. Alongside new signals, the way the algorithm affects sites was recalculated.
- 18 November 2011: Panda 3.1 (#9) –> Google itself announces this is a minor refresh affecting under 1% of searches.
- 18 January 2012: Panda 3.2 (#10) –> Google clarifies it was only a data refresh.
- 27 February 2012: Panda 3.3 (#11) –> another data refresh.
- 23 March 2012: Panda 3.4 (#12)
- 19 April 2012: Panda 3.5 (#13)
- 27 April 2012: Panda 3.6 (#14)
- 8 June 2012: Panda 3.7 (#15) –> another data refresh, but with a greater impact on queries.
- 25 June 2012: Panda 3.8 (#16)
- 24 July 2012: Panda 3.9 (#17)
- 20 August 2012: Panda 3.9.1 (#18) –> a data refresh, smaller than the previous one.
- 18 September 2012: Panda 3.9.2 (#19)
- 27 September 2012: Panda Update 20 –> the new EMD (exact match domain) filter arrives, affecting 2.4% of English-language queries and changing how the industry names new updates.
- 5 November 2012: Panda 21
- 21 November 2012: Panda 22
- 21 December 2012: Panda 23 –> a minor data refresh.
- 22 January 2013: Panda 24
- 14 March 2013: Panda 25 –> announced by Matt Cutts, who first says this will be the last update before the algorithm is folded into Hummingbird, then walks that back on 23 June, clarifying that new updates will simply come less often than before.
- 28 June 2013: Panda 26
- 18 July 2013: Panda Recovery (#27) –> this update softened some of Panda’s harsher effects, which had penalized various sites, and helped those sites recover positions in the SERPs.
- 19 May 2014: Panda 4.0 (#28) –> both a broad core update and a data refresh. Matt Cutts announced it on Twitter the following day. According to the official figures, 7.5% of English-language queries were affected, along with queries in other languages.
- 23 September 2014: Panda 4.1 (#29) –> another core update, affecting 3–5% of English-language queries and including some algorithm changes. Because of the slow rollout the exact date isn’t known, but the announcement came on 25 September.
- 18 July 2015: Panda 4.2 (#30) –> Google announces the rollout will take months and that this will be the algorithm’s final update.
- 11 January 2016: Integration (#31) –> Google confirms Panda has been folded into Hummingbird.
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered Google Panda. You now have what you need to understand what this search algorithm is and how it works, along with a short summary of the updates it went through.
Search engines are constantly trying to improve how they serve users quality content for a given query. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, semantic SEO, neural matching — these are just some of the recent arrivals that affect where content ranks, and therefore how SEO is done, and we’ll keep covering where they lead in the lessons ahead.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
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