Early in 2011, Google stated that they planned to implement over 500 ranking algorithm changes during 2011. They certainly are living up to that promise.
Thus far over the course of 2011 we have seen more Google ranking algorithm changes than we have seen cumulatively over the past five years. We do not know exactly how many of the promised changes have been implemented, but we do know that Google has been hard at work with an almost constant stream up changes not only focused on web site rankings, but also on the basic format of their search results pages.
Their most recent update occurred on November 3rd. Google’s Freshness Update focused mostly on elevating the rankings for newer articles and content related to searches where the timeliness of the information is important.
The first Google Panda Update was launched on February 23, 2011. It focused primarily on identifying and demoting the rank positions for sites using duplicate content and low-quality content. This change was welcomed by many who grew weary of seeing autoblogs and scraper web sites with duplicate or stolen content outranking sites that put hard work into developing high quality content with good informational value.
Google launched Panda with an announcement appropriately named Finding more high-quality sites in search. At that time no one outside of Google realized that this was just the first of a series of Panda-related updates.
Initially, Panda was referred to as the Farmer Update by the SEO community, primarily because it penalized the numerous free content sites, frequently referred to as “content farms”, that were creating millions of pages of poor-quality content. As soon as Google started referring to the update as Panda, the new moniker was adopted.
Google continues to refine their Panda Update with a series of smaller updates. While the first update had the most impact on search results, the smaller updates are mostly aimed that correcting errors that incorrectly penalized legitimate web sites and better identifying sites that slipped through the earlier updates.
Here are some of the additional updates that we’ve seen, along with the approximate dates when the changes were noticed.
Panda 2.0 ~ April 11
Panda 2.1 ~ May 9
Panda 2.2 ~ June 21
Panda 2.3 ~ July 23
Panda 2.4 ~ August 12 – Panda is implemented globally for all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Panda 2.5 ~ September 27
Panda 2.6 ~ October 14 – minor fluctuations seen in search results.
We probably have not seen the last of the Panda updates. We may also see additional freshness updates before the year is over.
