Monday,
February 24th marked the 9-year anniversary that Google unleashed the first
Panda algorithm update. On February 24th, 2011, the Google update – later known
as Panda, rocked the SEO world. Highly regarded as one of the most significant
algorithm updates in the history of Google, the Panda update drastically
changed the SEO landscape and how Google deems a website (and page) to be
relevant in search results.
According to this article from Search Engine Land, 12% of Google’s search
results were drastically changed on that cold day in 2011. Google made it clear
in the SEO
space that they aimed to drop sites that had “low quality” and “shallow”
content. The change had a significant impact on a lot of sites making money and
relying on organic traffic as their bread-and-butter.
In
fact, Google used to run Panda updates quite frequently during that period. The
aim was to hit new websites (several times) that didn’t fit into the new
standards of how Google qualified useful sites and quality content. As Google
kept running the Panda algorithm over questionable or low-quality sites, their
rankings would drop lower and lower – eventually making a low-quality site
become “unsearchable.” Now, Panda is a part of the core ranking algorithm and
Google does not run standalone updates for Panda anymore.
One of
the main things that Panda ended up influencing was how website owners
approached their site structure and wrote content for their pages. It forced
website owners to not focus on keywords and dubious ranking strategies
(grey/black hat SEO) to manipulate Google’s ranking factors. Website owners and
content creators now had to take the emphasis off ranking strategies and more
on quality, original content, and user experience.
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