All aboard the Panda SEO rollercoaster - again

Just when it seemed like the dust had finally more or less settled from Google’s rollout of its Panda SEO algorithm, the search engine giant has announced a new major update.

Pierre Far shared the news on his Google+ account, having taken over from Matt Cutts during his current sabbatical from the role of Head of Webspam.

On September 26th, Mr Far said: “Earlier this week, we started a slow rollout of an improved Panda algorithm, and we expect to have everything done sometime next week.

“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.”

In turn, he said that this update should allow more small to medium-sized websites, with a smaller amount of high-quality content, to rank higher in Google’s results, “which is nice”.

Meanwhile, in a Google Webmaster Central hangout, John Mueller of Google Switzerland confirmed that this is a global update – although different languages may be affected in different ways.

This tallies with Mr Far’s assertion that “depending on the locale, around 3-5% of queries are affected”.

At one in 20 searches, that’s a relatively high impact overall, so if you ignored Panda’s SEO implications last time around – and particularly if you have a small website – it’s the ideal time to invest in some good-quality content.