Google’s Panda Wakes Up After 10 Months – Update 4.2 Rolls Out

After last week’s Google Penguin Update information, coming from Google’s Gary Ilyes – this weekend the Google Panda finally woke up from its slumber after a 10-month long nap and has since started to slowly roll out to the length and breadth of the internet.

For the uninitiated, Google’s Panda Algorithm is a search filter designed by Google to prevent the websites with poor quality content from showing up high on Google search results. A few months ago Google also hinted that its going to target doorway pages. Its possible that this Panda roll-out could impact such doorway pages (with thin quality content) & the websites using them.

Though Panda is a sitewide update, – it looks for specific pages that have poor quality content and are bleeding authority off the website but impacts sitewide rankings for the keywords. Earlier Matt Cutts had also confirmed that a small amount of low quality content pages can drag your whole website down with them.

The last time we had an official Panda refresh was almost 10 months ago: Panda 4.1 was rolled out on September 25, 2014. This is the 31st Panda Update that has been rolled out by Google.

However, the latest Panda Update has caught many Webmasters unaware as it is being rolled out very slowly. Since its a slow roll-out it seems that any impact on rankings will take sometime. So far there has not been a lot of credible updates from webmasters regarding any affect on their SERP positions, perhaps, due to the “slow” nature of this update.

According to Google, as of now, about 2-3% of English language queries have been impacted by this update.

Here is an infographic which explains all that you need to know about the Google Panda Update.

Several Webmasters have their fingers crossed and are still wondering how this update might impact their websites. Has this Panda update impacted your website? We’d love to know more on this in comments below.