At the end of February, Google announced a “big algorithmic improvement” to its search algorithm that was intended to address much of the criticism the search engine had been garnering for content farms increasingly appearing in its search results.
Today, Google has announced that this algorithmic “improvement,” known as “Panda,” has gone global to all English-language Google users.
When Google first made the change, it noted that it was “a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries.”
“This update is 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,” the company said on its blog. “At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites–sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
Today, Google said that it has “gotten a lot of positive responses about the change” and decided to roll it out to a much larger audience. In addition, it has incorporated feedback from its Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which allows users to block certain domains from appearing in their search results.
“In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the ‘long tail’ of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.”
The change should be “smaller in scope,” affecting only 2% of queries as opposed to nearly 12% when it was first implemented.
