FEATURED ARTICLE — July 13th, 2018

Do You Still Have to Worry about Google’s Panda in 2018?

By Nik Tordil

Although Google has never talked about how often they update the algorithms on their search engine, it is widely speculated that they do more than 4 or 5 updates a year. However, few are as significant as the one that took place in February 2011. Dubbed as the “Panda,” there was nothing cute about this update as it hit thousands of webmasters with severe penalties for violating content guidelines. 

It is estimated that Panda affected about 12% of all searches which may not seem all that significant until you consider the fact that Google processes over 3.5 billion searches a day.  Looking back, Panda was essentially Google’s way of declaring war against web spam and other black-hat SEO practices.

Fast forward to 2018, and we have not seen any Panda-specific updates from Google in a while. The last one was in 2016 and only stated that Panda had become an integral element of Google’s core search engine algorithm. 

So is Panda still relevant today?

To get the answer, we need to understand what exactly was the Panda algorithm. Simply put, Panda was a Google search engine update designed to target poor quality content on web pages. It was a significant change that Google deemed necessary to start addressing many factors that were found to affect the quality of search engine results negatively. Such factors include:

Keyword stuffing – putting too many keywords in the content to purposefully manipulate search engine rankings

Insufficient and irrelevant content – articles that are too short to be useful or have nothing to do with the keywords  on the page

Broken links 

Duplicate and plagiarised content

Deceptive content – any content designed to trick users into doing something... Read More