Panda Update

Rolled out in 2011, the Panda algorithm aimed to lower the rankings of sites that were deemed to have low-quality and “thin” content. With Panda’s release, the motivation to create relevant, high-quality content became known among SEOs and marketers. Low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual low quality pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

Matt Cutts announced about it, “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Below see the list of released dates of Panda update:

- February 23, 2011 – Panda 1.0 (11.8% of queries impacted)
-April 11, 2011- Panda 2.0 (2% of queries impacted)
-May 9, 2011- Panda 2.1
-June 21, 2011 – Panda 2.2
-July 23, 2011- Panda 2.3
-August 12, 2011 – Panda 2.4 (6-9% of queries impacted)
-September 28, 2011 – Panda 2.5
-Oct. 19, 2011 - Panda Update 3.0 (2% of queries impacted)
-November 18, 2011 – Panda 3.1 (less than 1% of queries impacted)
-January 18, 2012 – Panda 3.2
-February 27, 2012 – Panda 3.3
-March 23, 2012 – Panda 3.4 (1.6% of queries impacted)
-April 19, 2012 – Panda 3.5
-May 27, 2012 – Panda 3.6
-June 8, 2012 – Panda 3.7 (1% of queries impacted)
-June 25, 2012 – Panda 3.8 (1% of queries impacted)
-July 24, 2012 – Panda 3.9 (1% of queries impacted)
-August 20, 2012 – Panda 3.9.1 (1% of queries impacted)
-September 18, 2012 – Panda 3.9.2 (0.7% of queries impacted)-Sep 27, 2012
-Nov 5, 2012 - Panda update released
-Nov 21, 2012 (impacting 0.8% of English queries; confirmed, not announced)
-Dec 21, 2012 (impacting 1.3% of English queries; confirmed, announced)
-Jan 22, 2013 (impacting 1.2% of English queries; confirmed, announced)
-Mar 14, 2013 – Panda update released