A Panda refresh will be rolling out over the next few days, Google today announced via Twitter. Google warned website owners to “expect some flux” during that time, also noting that less than 0.7 percent of queries will be affected.
Google Panda, which made its debut in February 2011, is aimed at rewarding what Google has determined to be high-quality websites. In addition to advising website owners to ask 23 questions about the quality of their own content, we got a small peek at some things Google advises its team of human quality raters to look for in terms of page quality, which means you should pay attention to these elements as well. As Google put it, high-quality pages are either “very satisfying, useful, or helpful for its purpose.”
In recent months, Google has announced Panda refreshes via Twitter, most recently on August 22 (with “~1% of queries noticeably affected”) and July 24 (with “~1% of search results change enough to notice”). While these percentages seem small, Google revealed at SES San Francisco that 3 billion searches are conducted every day on Google, so this latest Panda refresh could potentially affect some 21 million queries.
If you’ve seen rankings or traffic drops in the past three months, check your analytics around these dates to ensure you don’t have a quality issue. If you do have a quality or duplicate content issue, Josh McCoy offers some advice on how to recover in his post "Algorithm Updates, Duplicate Content & A Recovery".
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