Google's Core Algorithm Updated, Panda Absorbed

Earlier this month, webmasters were noticing major shifts in rankings. Some thought it was the long awaited Penguin 4.0 refresh, but rumblings on Twitter got Google's Gary Illyes' attention and he was quick to confirm no, it's not Penguin...but a core update instead.

Google went on to confirm that it hit the search results so aggressively because it was the latest version of the Core Algorithm, which now includes the Panda spam filters. That means that your overall site and content quality are more important than ever. Google was also quoted saying:

Panda is an algorithm that's applied to sites overall and has become one of our core ranking signals. It measures the quality of a site, which you can read more about in our guidelines. Panda allows Google to take quality into account and adjust ranking accordingly.

Panda's focus on quality content is NOT new, nor is this shift to making it part of the algorithm ( it's #7 in our 2016 predictions article). Until now, the Panda algorithm has been manually updating so its effects have been far more obvious. This shift to making it part of the core algorithm is good and bad. Good in the sense that you won't have to wait for randomly scheduled updates for sites to recover. Bad because it will be harder to really pinpoint a site that has been hit with Panda issues.

For anyone auditing websites this makes our jobs even harder. Regardless, even with the above revelation our advice to recover and protect yourself from Panda doesn't change, continue to: