Google Panda Update Goes International

The Panda/Farmer update from Google announced toward the end of February was confined to searches carried out on Google.com. The algorithm aimed at the identification of and subsequent penalisation of low quality content farms. Yesterday however, the change will now affect all English queries worldwide.

Whilst the original algo modification was thought to have affected approximately 12% of the US queries making their way through Google, the latest update is believed to be relatively minor, with only 2% of US queries feeling any discernible impact.

The idea behind the Panda update is in keeping with the underlying Google philosophy; to provide the most relevant search results as quickly as possible to users. Not so long ago, Google was arming users with the means to block the sites of their choosing from their SERPs. Initially, a Chrome extension offered the capability to “block [URL]” within the search results.

The evolution of this extension came at the beginning of March with the appearance of a “Block all [URL] results” within the Google search listings.

Although the data gleaned from such blocking tools was not used by Google as a signal in the algorithm, they did refer to the information as a justification of the more recent Panda update; they reported that an 84% overlap in sites that were negatively impacted by Panda and sites which had been blocked by users with the Chrome extension.

Despite Google's insistence that the original Panda update was not aimed exclusively at content farms, it was pretty clear that such sites would bear the brunt of the algo changes.

While the Google algorithm update has resulted in the dismissal of various low quality sites such as Suite 101, there have been numerous reports of genuinely innocent sites dropping significantly within the rankings as a direct result of the Panda update. Complaints from unsuspecting webmasters led to the creation of a thread in Google webmaster central; here all who suspect they have been unfairly penalised by the search engine algorithm can vent their frustrations.