Google Rolls Out Panda 4.1 to Penalize “thin” or Poor Content from Ranking Well

Google has announced that 27th version of its Panda Update has been released. It’s a filter designed to penalize “thin” or poor content in search rankings.

Google said through a post on Google+ that a “slow rollout” began earlier this week and will continue into next week. It’s an improved version of Panda Update which will affect 3% to 5% search queries. As informed earlier, it will affect those sites which have thin or poor quality contents(copied contents, grammatically incorrect sentences, sites filled with Ads etc).
Google Panda 4.1 Update

What’s New in Panda 4.1 Algorithm?

According to Google, Panda 4.1 update is supposed to be more precise and will allow high quality small and medium-sized sites to rank better. Google also claims that it has discovered additional signals based on user and webmaster feedback to help panda more accurately indentify low quality contents.

This means that now you don’t need a massive site to rank higher in Google. In an announcement, Google Said:
Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.

New Chance for Some while Penality for Others

The rollout means that new sites which were not previously hit by Panda might get impacted. To know whether your site has been impacted or not, have a look at your “Google Analytic Data. If you’ve seen a suddent traffic drop from this week, or one in the coming days, then this latest Panda Update has surely affected your site.

The rollout also means that anyone who was previously penalized by Panda has a chance to emerge again, if they corrected the issues. If you were hit by the last update and later on made changes, it’s the time to check your traffic. If you see an increase in traffic by the end of next week, then it means this update worked out in your favor.
Here is what SEJ’s founder Loren Baker had to say about this 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.

Why the name Panda 4.1?

Well, Google itself named the last update “Panda 4.0″ and deemed it a major update. This time, it’s not as big of change, so its name is Panda 4.1. We actually prefer to number these updates in the order that they have happened.

When you should Expect the next Panda Update?

Actually, it’s tough to predict about the updates of Google. Panda had been updated on a roughly monthly basis during 2012 but it wasn’t updated at all in year 2013. However ,the latest update comes four months after the last, which suggests that this might be a new quarterly cycle. It means, you can expect the next Panda Update after 4 Months.
from - geteverything.org