In 2011, Google shook a significant portion of web pages with a new large-scale algorithm update. A lot of websites have lost their top position on Google’s search results list and with them the majority of their visitors. The algorithm update has been dubbed Panda update and has undergone several refinements since its introduction.
Like all other Google updates, Panda aims to increase the user experience for search engines. Accordingly, Google Panda targets lower quality websites that are worthless to users. The algorithm, by examining several factors simultaneously, ranks back the websites that provide worthless and poor user experience.
Before the Panda update, a lot of people created websites that were not made for users but for the search engine robot. In many cases, the sole purpose of these pages was to get visitors to a good position in Google’s search results list and then generate advertising revenue from those visitors while not providing any useful content to their visitors. One of the great goals of the Panda update was to filter out these websites.
Penalty for Panda update:
- Automatically generated content
- Duplicate content within a website – There is too much content similarity between pages. Many articles within the site are about the same thing, to put it a little bit.
- Short, worthless articles
- Too many occurrences of spelling, stylistic errors
- Poor, unprofessional wording – quality articles and descriptions should be sought
- Page load too slow
- A page full of ads
So, overall, Google Panda aims to list only websites that provide visitors with really useful information and a relevant user experience.