People have been experiencing significant changes in search engine rankings over the past few weeks due to Panda 4.0 algorithm. Google Panda was created a better ranking for quality websites that actually have good content and it acts as a filter for the low quality and low content sites.

1. Google Panda 4.0 and its Impacts

2. What is Google Panda ?
• Google launched Panda in February 2011 as a
modification in its search results ranking
algorithm to filter the low quality and low
content sites and give an upper hand to the
top ranking results with good quality.
• The introduction of Google Panda created a better ranking for
quality websites that actually have good content. There
have been nearly 26 updates to Google Panda since its
introduction.

3. What is Google Payday Algorithm?
• The Google Payday Loan 1.0 was launched on June 11, 2013 to
target the ‘spammy queries’ like payday loan, adult content and
other heavily spammed queries.
• Payday Loan 2.0 was launched on May 19, 2014 which is the
next generation algorithm of Payday Loan 1.0. This update is
supposed to specifically target ‘very spammy queries’ which
typically get associated with excessive web spam, primary payday
loans, insurance, accident claims etc.
• The Payday Loan 2.0 is said to affect different languages to
different extents, with English queries being affected by 0.2% to a
noticeable degree.

4. Why was Google Panda 4.0 launched?
• Google launched on May 21, 2014 which is not a mere
refresh of the existing algorithm but is a new update.
• According to Google affects different languages to
different degrees. In English for example, the impact is ~7.5% of queries
that are affected to a degree that a regular user might notice.
• Google’s launching of both Payday Loan 2.0 and Panda 4.0 within a span of
a week was supposed to help SME better. Since benefits
most of the small businesses, many big businesses have been pulled
down in their ranks.

5. Negative Impact
Few of the big companies’ websites that lost their rankings
because of are given below:
• ask.com > – 50%
• ebay.com > – 33%
• yellowpages.com > – 20%
• aceshowbiz.com > – 75%
• examiner.com > – 50%
The real story here might be the winners, as they
gained a substantially greater percentage of traffic than the losers
lost.

6. Positive Impact
Glassdoor, a website that helps job seekers was the most
benefitted one due to followed by
E Medicine health, which provides health information for
consumers and Medterms, a medical dictionary.
These are few famous winners, along with the percentage of traffic gained:
• glassdoor.com > 100%
• emedicinehealth.com > 500 %
• yourdictionary.com > 50%
• zimbio.com > 500 %
• buzzfeed.com > 25%
For the most part, it seems that a lot of good quality
content that’s useful to searchers saw huge gains in
traffic thanks to

7. Major Setbacks
• Panda 4.0 created both positive and negative effects. But
many famous companies have been hit badly by this
change, not due to their bad content but due to
unknown reasons.
• Major PRWeb, PR Newswire, BusinessWire
and PRLog are losing from 60% to 85% of their
SEO visibility.
• The main reason for the setback of the PRWeb is more or
less unknown though Panda 4.0 is blamed.

8. What do the findings mean?
• The websites lost their ranks mainly due to usage of
duplicated content in their website and they are called
as aggregators. Their main ranking is based on
information gained from other websites preliminarily.
• Considering all the points about Panda 4.0, there are
many websites using third party information and so have
been cut down on ranks; still if the issues are not fixed soon enough,
scope for websites to escape the same is also there.

9. Thank you!
ks@in1947.com