It’s that jittery time again for bloggers! Right now, Google is rolling out a Panda update (September 2014). Whenever Google updates its algorithms, the entire web feels the shock. Professional bloggers especially feel nervous about Google updates (like Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird etc.) because their blogs are their main source of online income.
So, fellow bloggers! brace up and let’s see how this new update in Panda algorithm will affect us!
Well, Google has a very smart search algorithm (which is the secret behind Google’s success). Google crawls the entire internet and ranks all the web pages according to its search algo. It is said that this search algo considers about 200 factors in deciding which page will be ranked higher.
Google keeps on updating its search algorithm.
Google keeps on updating this search algorithm. And they name each of these updates. Penguin and Panda updates have been particularly infamous as they demoted websites even like eBay!
A large number of bloggers were affected when Panda update was made in April 2011. In this update, Google tweaked its search algorithm in a way so as to rank the “low quality” websites lower in search results. The original Panda update affected about 12% search results and it targeted websites that were having low quality content and using black hat tricks.
In the past, TechWelkin traffic also was badly affected by Panda and Penguin. But I worked hard (really hard!) to recover it from the depth. Such events break the enthusiasm of a lot of bloggers. You need to remain focused and keep on doing good work if you want to succeed in professional blogging.
Soon, people began to ask “What is a good quality website?”… to answer this, Google released a list of points that may define good quality content.
After original Panda update, Google has been making more updates on the same line as of original Panda 1.0 update.
Today, they are rolling out yet another Panda update. Google’s Pierre Far posted the following message on official Google plus page:
Earlier this week, we started a slow rollout of an improved Panda algorithm, and we expect to have everything done sometime next week.
Based on user (and webmaster!) 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.
Depending on the locale, around 3-5% of queries are affected.
As Pierre Far is saying, smaller blogs may actually benefit from this update. In updates during last 2-3 years, the high traffic websites gained even more traffic, and it became very difficult for new bloggers to lift their blogs. It would take a great amount of time for a new blogger to succeed in getting decent amount of traffic.
But now, it appears, that Google has realized that it should look after good quality but smaller websites also.
Has your blog seen any jump in traffic during last 2 weeks? If yes, you may need to thank this latest Panda update.
Do share your experience. Did you blog see and changes in traffic?
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