One of Google’s most important algorithms Google Panda was officially announced as part of the core ranking algorithm. Jennifer Slegg posted a guide around the panda update that included a statement:

Panda is an algorithm that’s applied to sites overall and has become one of our core ranking signals. It measures the quality of a site, which you can read more about in our guidelines. Panda allows Google to take quality into account and adjust ranking accordingly.

This news will likely mean that Google will not confirm another panda update in the future. The last one that was confirmed was panda 4.2 which was anticipated to roll out over many months. And now the algorithm is infused into their main one.

There are still many questions around what this means and lots of confusion.

Since Google announced the panda algorithm is now part of the core ranking algorithm many people have assumed that the update may have set new panda scores but this is not the case. Gary Illyes of Google made it clear on twitter that this had nothing to do with the panda signals.

Another bit of confusion was does Panda now run in real-time, it does not. It was quickly explained that the real-time panda stuff is wrong Gary Illyes explained that the Panda algorithm is not running in real-time or immediately.