Google Panda is a filter that prevents low quality sites or pages from ranking well in the search engine results page. Google have recently updated Google panda, with this new update it is now at 4.2, business owners will need to see if this change affects their website. Google’s success comes down to the company constantly improving their product, Google Search. It has been over a year since the last Google panda update, this means that people who have been penalized by panda in the last update can now improve their search ranking on Google with the new update if appropriate changes are made. This change also means that other websites can now be penalized under the new Google panda.

What have Google said about these changes

Google normally don’t give too much away with their updates because they don’t want people to cheat the system. However, Google did suggest that medium and small sized companies are going to reap the benefits of this panda update. Google employees suggested that it was just refreshing the system however, Pierre Far from Google said “Based on user feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely”. “This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice”. Another spokesman from Google also said “we have begun a Panda update that will rollout over the coming months,” “as you know, we’re always working to improve Google so search results are higher quality and more relevant for everyone and this is just one way we do that”. The 4.2 panda update is a very small change in Google searches algorithm. It is supposed to affect 2 to 3 percent of English Language searches which out of all the other updates it is the one where the least people are affected. The last update back in September 2014 affected 3 to 5 percent of people.

What it means for businesses

Businesses rely on search traffic to bring people to their sites; however a drop in rankings can have a negative effect on traffic to their sites. There have been studies that suggest a top ranking page got twice as many clicks than the second ranked page and 10 times more clicks than the 10th ranked page on the search results. Businesses will need to be up to date if they want their company at the top of the result if they want the traffic to come to their page due to Google’s algorithm change. The Google panda 4.2 update has brought new files for web spam, Website owners wanted all the changes to be done quickly so they could see if they needed to make changes to their site. With the changes being slow it will take time before the full extent of the changes are known. With this in mind Business owners will need to thoroughly check to see if their website is where they want it to be.

Is the panda 4.2 update a refresh rather than an update?

For people who have read up about Google panda this update is technically a refresh and not an update. This means that it is reapplying the identical signals from the previous panda for this update.

Summary of Panda 4.2 update

Now the panda 4.2 update has arrived businesses might struggle to identify what changes have taken place and whether it has affected their website. In time when the rollout has finished business should be able to see if the panda 4.2 update has affected their website.