Thursday, May 22nd, 2014
On May 20, 2014 Matt Cutts announced that Google started to roll out a new update to it’s Panda algorithm. As you know, Panda was implemented to identify low quality content and prevent them from getting in the top search results. If you wonder why is this update more important than others that came monthly since Panda was released, the answer is simple: this one is a game changer!
Panda 4.0 update is an algorithm change which means that Google will use new methods to identify the low quality websites. It’s impact is said to be visible for about 7.5% of all English search queries and searchmetrics. com already comes out with a list of losers and winners.
The most notorious loser is eBay. They lost 80% of their organic rankings by providing a low quality experience for their users – people who were organically searching for a product and clicked on an eBay result would be lead to a page that contained a photo with the product, very little content, internal links and ads.
After just 2 days the results are visible – people who are affected saw not only a decrease of their positions in search, but also a lower overall traffic to their websites. More details about Panda 4.0 update impact will be discovered in time as more case studies will be made and more relevant findings will be disclosed.
Google is rolling out our Panda 4.0 update starting today.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 20, 2014