Google Updates “Panda” Filter, Impacts 7.5% Of Search Results

Yesterday, Google has made a significant change to their Panda filter, named Panda 4.0. This is the biggest update to the Panda algorithm in ages and may be the cause of some ranking changes you may be noticing in Google today and throughout the week. Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced on Twitter […]

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Yesterday, Google has made a significant change to their Panda filter, named Panda 4.0. This is the biggest update to the Panda algorithm in ages and may be the cause of some ranking changes you may be noticing in Google today and throughout the week.

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that the update Panda filter began rolling out yesterday. Here is Matt’s tweet:

 

Google told us “Panda 4.0 affects different languages to different degrees.” Adding that “in English for example, the impact is ~7.5% of queries that are affected to a degree that a regular user might notice.”

That means this update is the largest Panda update since Panda 6 on Aug. 12, 2011, which impacted the international space by 6-9%. But this is indeed the largest update of Panda for English queries since Panda launched on February 24, 2011, where it had a 11.8% impact on queries.

Why such a large change? From talking to Google, it sounds like this update will be gentler for some sites, and lay the groundwork for future changes in that direction. So it seems like Google has made some major and fundamental changes to the Panda algorithm.

For more details, see our story on Search Engine Land.

Postscript: We have now published the big Winners & Losers from this update at Search Engine Land.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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