Google Panda definition

 Officially deployed for the first time on February 24, 2011, Google Panda is a filter of the eponymous search engine aimed at redacting from its results pages with content considered duplicate, insufficient or of poor quality.

Previously updated monthly, this filter is now an integral part of the algorithm. Updates and resulting sanctions are now done in real time.

Filter history

Intended to sanction poor quality content, Panda is not immediately deployed globally. It is first tested in the United States:

  • February 24, 2011: "Farmer Update", aka Panda 1.0, upsets the SERPS across the Atlantic
  • April 11, 2011: Panda 2.0 now concerns all English-speaking results without exception
  • August 11, 2011: Europe, United States, the whole world is affected by a new version of this filter. According to sources, it sometimes bears the name of Panda 2.4, sometimes that of Panda 3.0. In France, the impact on results is significant
  • March 2013: after several updates, the “Panda Everflux” filter is now integrated into the algorithm in real time. This implies that updates are continuous, as do penalties applied to sites that do not meet Google guidelines for editorial content and SEO.

Hunting for duplicate or low value content

The clearly stated goal of Google Panda is to sanction and fight against what are called content farms, these sites publishing a lot of content of poor quality and inconsistent with each other for the sole purpose of generating visibility and audience.

This concerns in particular the duplicate content or duplicate content in English. This can take different forms:

  • internal duplicate content: this is a description or an article found on several pages of the same site
  • external duplicate content: this time, it is a copy and paste from another site, often without its consent. In this case, Google prioritizes the canonical url, that is to say that of the original content, and not that which has been "looted" (scraping)
  • content generated automatically thanks to content spinning. The latter consists of replacing terms or groups of words with synonyms to produce large quantities of relatively close texts.
  • spam comments on a blog are also considered duplicate content since it is the same text automatically published by bots on hundreds or thousands of sites. A captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) or a hidden empty field is an effective anti-spam solution

Google Panda: what penalties?

Obviously, the Panda filter does not just have the function of spotting low quality content or duplicate content. Its main function is to penalize all sites that do not respect Google's SEO guidelines, in particular by downgrading them in its results or by blacklisting them. In the latter case, the offending site disappears completely and may never be re-indexed by the search engine.

If the first Google Panda penalties systematically resulted in the outright disappearance of the site considered to be of poor quality by the Mountain View giant, today the penalties are more gradual and proportionate. They can thus take the form of a disappearance of certain pages of the results, up to that of the site as a whole.

So, how do you know if your pages contain duplicate content and if you risk a total loss of visibility? First of all by respecting the instructions of number 1 of search and by requesting an audit from our expert agency in Google penalties.

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