Last Updated on May 30, 2019 by Numinix Developer
If you weren’t affected by the first few Panda updates, you are not out of hot water yet. It looks like Google is making Panda a staple that will grow and expand as needed.
While Google has not officially mentioned the dates of the Panda rollouts, many webmasters are suspecting that the newest Panda update (Panda 2.2) has already occurred. Excessive movement in rankings, up and down, has many people wondering.
It seems that the latest update is focused on removing scraped content. Google has received numerous complaints from webmasters claiming content is copied (scraped) from their sites and this copied content is ranking higher than their original content. Matt Cutts, Google software engineer, assured users that Google is working on the issue and a change has been approved. This information seems to have led to Panda 2.2.
What is scraped content?
Scraped content is essentially content that is copied from one website to another that is repurposed to look different, but in actuality it is a duplicate page. For webmasters who created the original content, scraped content is an injustice. Additionally, in Google’s eyes, scraped content does not add any value to a website and it is only present to fill the pages of a site for the purpose of looking good to the search engines.
Matt Cutts emphasizes the importance of valuable, original content. Google is making it harder and harder for people to post half-baked, mediocre content for the purpose of appeasing the search engines. With the past and future algorithmic changes, only the best content will survive as Google continues to give its users the best search experience.
How to Recover from a Google Panda Update
A few weeks ago Matt Cutts was quoted saying, “If we think you’re relatively high quality, Panda will have a smaller impact. If you’re expert enough and no one else has the good content, even if you’ve been hit by Panda that page can still rank.”
The Panda update works differently than Google’s spam detection tools. It essentially tags certain sites whenever the Panda update is run on Google’s entire index of websites. This means that making changes to your site, if you were affected by the Panda updates, would not produce any immediate results. If the changes you made are beneficial to users, your changes will most likely be registered by the next Panda update.
You’ll notice now that Google has the +1 button on search results as well as a widget you can put on your site. This now impacts search results so make sure you get the widget on your site to promote people to give you a +1. Zen Cart users can use our mod, Google Plus One Button, to easily add the widget: http://www.numinix.com/zen-cart-modules/social-networking/google-plus-one-button