What Is Google Panda?
It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Google Panda! Google Panda, one of the most famous updates in search engine history, took place in February of 2011. It was one set of animal-themed updates that would take place over the next few years. The update was intended to change how Google evaluated websites and their content. The goal was to improve search results for users by prioritizing higher-quality sites and demoting lower-quality ones. Many considered the initial rollout successful, but there were also some problems with it—many areas that weren't regarded as high quality were also demoted. After several iterations on the algorithm that would later become known as "Panda," Google tweaked things again in 2014 with an update called "Panda 4.0. " This update included a new ranking feature called "Top Heavy" that increased the weight given to sites with large amounts of content on their homepages relative to those with less or no content (such as ads). In 2011, Google released a new algorithm update that changed how it ranked websites. It was called Panda and intended to target low-quality content on websites. Google's definition of "low quality" varies depending on the type of website you're talking about. For instance, suppose you have a website with thousands of articles written by paid writers who are churning content to stuff keywords into their article titles and body copy. In that case, this is considered low-quality content by Google. But what about an encyclopedia or how-to site? These sites can be massive, with tons of articles and resources available to human readers who are looking for details on a particular topic. These sites can also be data-poor (low on valuable information) and ad-heavy (high on ads). So when Google released Panda in 2011, it began adjusting its ranking algorithm so that these types of sites would no longer rank as high as they used to in search engine results pages (SERPs). In effect, the Panda update punished these sites for producing low-quality content—and rewarded higher-quality ones instead!
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