Penguin & Panda Updates Continue to Punish Sites


Penguin hit again officially on May 25th when Matt Cutts tweeted the release of another 'refresh' which was immediately dubbed Penguin 1.1. Then in Google's monthly search quality blog they stated that the update was actually more than just a data refresh. It included minor tweaks to the algorithm itself. According to Cutts, the update will affect less than 0.1% of English searches.

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The Latest on Panda...

After a significant shift in the search results and many rumors, Google also confirmed that they had rolled out Panda 3.7. The initial refresh took place June 8th and according to a Google tweet on June 11th, "Less than 1% of queries [were] noticeably affected in the U.S. and 1% worldwide."

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Google ended the month of June with the release of Panda 3.8 on the 25th. It was also said to effect less than 1% of the searches worldwide. These small tweaks are going to continue to roll out with no end in site.

Remember, the Penguin Update targets webspam, over optimization and specific linking issues. Panda, on the other hand, is more focused on a site's content including its relevance, originality and freshness.

If you've been hit before and haven't seen improvements or even got hit again in this latest series of update, you didn't make strong enough changes to your site. You will really need to re-evaluate your tactics because those old tricks won't work anymore.

We've been covering these issues for months and this month is no exception. The penalty specific resources in this month's issue cover what it takes to recover, what you did to get penalized and even how to insulate your site from these types of updates in the future. You can read up on these resources here:

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