Last week Google announced that new Panda update would be launched.
The update started rolling out earlier last week, and it is expected that everything will be finished by sometime this week.
This update consists of a new method to identify low quality content thanks to user feedback. Consequently, many websites are prognosed to be ranking higher. Another positive news is that any penalization you might have been awarded by Panda previously, has no effect anymore, provided you have corrected the issue. If this update has worked out in your favor, you will be able to see a traffic increase by the end of the next week. On the other hand, with this update Google has now new possibilities to penalize your website if low quality content is detected. Depending on your location, approx. 3-5 % are effected.
Below you can see an expert analysis by Loren Baker of the new update:
This new Panda algorithmic update reinforces the fact that Google is not a fan of thin content and that crawl efficiency along with serving clear and direct data messages to Google are becoming more important than ever.
Specializing XML sitemaps, trimming back on thin content and making sure that you are serving Google exactly what they need with minimal effort expended on part of Google-bot needs to be a huge emphasis. More so, also making sure that even in XML sitemaps, crawl priority is properly defined, and old content is not recrawled unless there is specific reason.
The more that SEOs can serve Google basic data without mixed messages (for example conflicts with sitemap, WMT, URL parameter and robots.txt commands) the more Google is going to reward the SEO.
