What exactly happened?

Google's 'Panda' algorithm is now part of Google core ranking algorithm. The Panda algorithm measures the quality of a website. It is a filter that prevents low quality sites or pages from ranking well in the search engine results pages.

Google's John Mueller shared some details

In a webmaster hangout, Google's John Mueller revealed further information about the algorithm update:

"As part of the core algorithm, you probably wouldn’t see those kind of updates happening. That’s something that’s just kind of rolling along, so it’s not so much like in the past where you’d see on this date, this actually changed, we updated that. So that’s something kind of something as a more rolling algorithm you wouldn’t really see the individual cut dates of specific parts of the data. [...]

[The integrated Panda algorithm] is not real time in the sense that we crawl URLs and have that data immediately.

So it’s something we kind of have to bundle together, understand the data, and have that updated. And we do that on more a rolling basis now so that when one is finished, the next one kind of starts.

So it’s real time if you look at a really big scale in that things are happening all the time, but it’s not real time in the sense that every second there is a new value that’s being produced based on new a new data point that we have."

What do you have to do now?

If your website contains pages with 'thin' content, it's better to remove these pages from your website. Here are a few common examples of pages that often have thin content with little or no added value:

• Automatically generated content
• Thin affiliate pages
• Content from other sources. For example: Scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts
• Doorway pages

If the vast majority of your web pages have good quality, a few low quality pages won't hurt your rankings. That said, it's usually better to remove these low quality pages from your website.

The tools in our web-based website optimization tool SEOprofiler help you to improve the search engine rankings of your web pages. We continually update SEOprofiler to make sure that the tools work with the latest algorithms of Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you haven't done it yet, try SEOprofiler now.

Article by Axandra
SEO software