Google Panda Update

Google has announced a major ranking algorithm update – Panda 4.0. 

A number of websites have lost their rankings after the update and it’s possible your website may be affected. The update was announced by Google’s Matt Cutts on Twitter:

The Panda algorithm targets websites with poor quality content and means that Google has probably changed how they identify low quality content.

According to a number of reports on the web, major sites like ebay.com, ask.com, and biography.com have lost up to 70% of their Google rankings. It would seem that the content of these web pages (which is often automatically created) is not good enough for Google’s new ranking algorithm.

Will this affect your website?

If your website has a lot of very similar pages, it’s likely that it will be affected by this new algorithm. The same applies if the content of your pages has been created automatically.

But if your site has good original content this update won’t do anything to your rankings.  The basic rule applies, if you do not spam, you have nothing to fear.