Panda is a Google algorithm update from 2011 that aims to improve search quality by favoring websites with high-quality, original content over low-quality sites. It analyzes factors like design, trustworthiness, speed and content quality. Sites can be impacted if they have low-quality pages like tag pages, duplicate content, or pages created just for keywords rather than user intent. The document provides advice on how sites can improve by identifying and removing low-quality pages, adding fresh original content, and building more internal and external links to strong pages. It warns that sites still risk future Panda updates if they do not proactively address quality issues.

1. Almost A Year Later: Still Pondering Panda

2. What Is Panda?
• Didn‘t you just hear Barry talk about it?
That was originally a 3 hour speech
• Search algorithm change introduced in
early 2011—It‘s been almost a year!
• Was meant to incorporate ―page quality‖
as a search signal; Google wants to
return better quality pages to searchers,
and Panda helps ‗em do it.
• Affects low-quality sites/pages worldwide

3. What Isn’t Panda?
• An excuse for everything. If you‘re
site dropped in the last year, but not
on a Panda date, it‘s NOT Panda.
• Just for content farmers (that‘s why
it‘s not called Farmer). If you have
low quality pages, like tags,
secondary list pages or search result
pages, affects you too.
• A regular, automatic algorithm update.

4. How Panda Works
• Human quality tester sorts through thousands of websites
and rates them based on certain criteria such as:
• Design
• Trustworthiness
• Speed
• Content
• Based on these benchmarks set by human quality
testers, computers using Artificial Intelligence are
implemented to copy the behavior of the human
quality testers.
• Once these algorithms become accurate at
predicting what these human quality testers look
for, they are released across millions of websites
throughout the Internet.

5. 1.
When Panda Happened
Panda Update 1.0: Feb 24, 2011
• Targets Content farm and Scrapper sites.
2. Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011
• International rollout for English based websites.
• Incorporated data about user blocked sites.
3. Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011
• Only minor tweaks were made to its search algorithm
4. Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011
• Manually pushed out search algorithm changes
• Improved on scrapper site detection
5. Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011
• Incorporates signals on how to better
differentiate between low and high quality websites.
6. Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011
• International rollout for most languages.
7. Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011
1. 2.5.1 – October 9, 2011
2. 2.5.2 – October 13, 2011
3. 2.5.3 – October 19/20, 2011
8. Panda Update 3.0/3.1: November 18, 2011
1. 3.2 – December 19, 2011
2. 3.3 – January 6, 2011 (?)

6. Panda Strikes!
• Some sites, like the ticket retailer
below, lost half their search traffic.
• They weren‘t content farmers, but
they did have unique pages for each
concert date

7. Panda 2.5, In Detail
• Specific details of what exactly changed are unclear, however, many websites
reported major losses in search traffic.
• According to Searchmetrics, Panda 2.5 is favoring sites that use video.
1. hulu.com
2. youtube.com
3. mtv.com
4. nbc.com
• Losers of Google Panda 2.5
1. technorati.com
2. consummeraffairs.com
3. entrepreneur.com
4. today.com
• Winners of Google Panda 2.5
1. youtube.com
2. zappos.com
3. perezhilton.com
4. wsj.com

8. What People Did Wrong
• Every page needs a raison d'etre, or at least a
reason to be indexed.
• Many pages don‘t. Why would someone want a
tag page or page four in a list of articles, instead
of the article itself? Why would they want to go
from a search results page to another SERP?
• Do you generate pages based on keywords,
even with no content to put on those pages?
That‘s low-quality too.
• Repackaging content? Spinning Content? Five
pages with similar text with slight variations to
go after slightly different keywords? All guilty.

9. Fighting Back!

10. How They Fixed It
• The Easy, Temporary Fix: New Domain
or Subdomain
• The Real Way:
• Identify the low-quality pages
• Determine if the site needs them
• Delete or NoIndex/Block them
• Or make high-quality
• Write new, relevant content for your
strong pages, or your improved low-
quality pages
• Build more links to your strong
pages, or your improved low-quality
pages

11. How To Improve a Page
• Add unique, new/fresh, relevant content
• Make the page look nicer: improve
the layout, reduce the ads
• Change the URL; avoid words
like ―tag,‖ ―results‖ and ―search‖
• Add rich media, like images and
video to the page
• Highlight the new, improved page
in your site (link from the home page)

12. Keep It Fresh
• Events, Editorial/Release Calendar,
Press, Featured Products or Stories—
There are lots of ways to make new,
fresh content.
• Give fresh links—internally and
externally—to your new content
• Evergreen can be fresh! Combine
your topic and tag pages for strong
and fresh landing pages

13. Treat Google Well
• Build ―High quality sites‖ that users will enjoy.
• Avoid duplicate content.
• Provide original content.
• Provide well edited content.
• (Don‘t scrape and/or spin.
You‘re just not good enough.)
• Avoid overuse of ads that
distract from or get in the way
of main content.
• Avoid short articles that
lack substance.
• Implement rich media content, like images or video.

14. Moving Forward
• This won‘t be the last Panda
• If you suffer from these issues—
low quality pages—but you
haven‘t been hit, don‘t breathe
that sigh of relief just yet.
Preemptively fix your site before
Google catches up with you
• Put the user first and give each
page a reason to exist

15. Want More? Contact Me
Eli Feldblum
201-815-9467
054-XXX-XXXX (until Wed.)
eli@rankabove.com
@FeldBum