Panda 2.2 is Just Around the Corner
Attention all SEO experts, marketers web masters and business owners! Panda 2.2 is coming up and soon. Is your site ready for the next algorithm update?
At the SMX Advanced Marketing Conference held two weeks ago, Matt Cutts confirmed that the Panda 2.2 update has been approved, but not yet rolled out.
The next update will reportedly target sites that re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content. This was a common complaint among many web site owners about the first Panda update. Since Google couldn’t accurately identify the original source, the real author was sometimes penalized as a content farm along with the spammers. “A change has been approved that should help with that issue,” said Cutts during his Q&A with Danny Sullivan, producer of the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series and Search Engine Land leader.
The first Panda update was designed to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful,” said Google in a blog post back in February. About 12% percent of search queries were affected. In April, Panda was rolled out globally and incorporated Google “blocking” data. About 2% of US searches were affected from that update. To learn more about the original Panda update, check out this Search Engine Optimization Journal post from early March.
Many site owners who were negatively affected by the first Panda update claim they have yet to fully recover. Google released a set of guidelines for sites to help them make their site more Panda-appropriate, but they insist that no manual exceptions have been made to help penalized sites.
During the Q&A, Cutts noted that the Panda is update isn’t run on a regular basis. Google manually runs the algorithm (presumably when the algorithm is improved), which means that site owners who updated their site might not see immediate recovery. This has been a great source of frustration for many site owners who A) aren’t necessarily sure why their site was affected with the first update, B) aren’t sure if they are making the appropriate changes to be more Panda friendly and C) want to know when their site will recover.
It will be interesting to see what happens to sites when the Panda 2.2 rolls out. Will sites that unfairly escaped the first attack on content farms finally get penalized? Will sites that were unfairly affected be redeemed as the original author’s of widely plagiarized content? Time will tell.
What do you think Panda 2.2 will do?
6 Responses to “Panda 2.2 is Just Around the Corner”
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Spammers should be punished. I welcome this update and will be waiting for that.
i applaud google’s efforts.. although i think it’s terrible that some site owners seem to have been negatively effected when not deserving.. hopefully they get that squared away, but overall i think any update which rewards original content & human effort is a good thing
It’s about time. being that I have a hard enough time writing good content and trying to rank it sure seems unjust to have other people ranking for just rehashing the same content.
Thanks for the article nicely done and to the point.
Kevin Taylor
They can’t do it. That’s the bottom line. They can’t just apply any standard, I don’t care how good the algorithm is and weed out who’s content is who’s. The don’t actually index every article that is written and published online now. Too much processing power. They have some awesome computers, but you have to look at the reality of how long it takes super computers to just read DNA.
Google is no different. They can’t ready through a Trillion or more websites and all content and figure out who did what first. I call it impossible as this is a human factor. They have some smart people there, but they are not that smart. They will get some more of the dummies, but they will hit good sites again.
I have over 140 Auto Blogs and about 50-60 of those sites are really bad with duplicate content and after all the updates, Farmer, Panda, whatever; everything that wasn’t already ranked high, moved up even higher in the Rankings.
There are too many factors here. In 5, 6, 7 years I still don’t think they will be able to do it. Why? Privacy, Trademarks, and the Internet is not Googles. The Internet is an International commodity, not just a hub for Google.com and they know it. That and International Law and Personal Privacy Restrictions will always be in their way and there is always that one little thing called Monoploization that Microsoft and other Companies will not let Google have. I think they spend more time in the courts now that they do anything else.
Look at the Personal Information scraper called Google Chrome, they will have more court battles that will keep them at bay.
I don’t like crap sites anymore than anyone else, but until they invent a tagging system for content, this is the way it will be.
Thanks Mike for checking in, sharing your thoughts about the Google Panda update…
Take Care,
Nick
much needed improvement – for us it’s been particularly frustrating with press releases for clients but across the board this will make for a more effective user experience. How do you expect it to roll out locally vs. on a global scale?