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Many webmasters view Google Panda as an algorithm that having on-going changes to Google’s search result ranking. The algorithm was launched in February 2011, with the goal is to mainly targeting websites who have low quality or thin content by decreasing their rank in search engine results, while websites with high quality content seeing increase. But, how important is this algorithm? With Google Panda isn’t one-time occurrence algorithm, means it’s important for webmasters to increasing their website quality, if they want their website rank well in search engines. With Google regularly updating its data, victim websites can have an opportunity to recover their traffic and rankings by having useful and unique content on their site.

Every year, about hundreds time Google keeps changing its search algorithm. While most of the changes are hard to notice, but some time, it will announce a major update that is going to largely affect rankings of websites. The first ever Google Panda update happened on February 23rd, 2011 causing a whopping 11.8% of search queries. Victim websites from Google Panda were having significant decrease in traffic.

April 11th, 2011 is the second major Google Panda update rolled out. The update mainly affecting English-language based search result and 2% of search queries. Then Panda having more changes after that, and affecting search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Not only causing websites traffics and rankings, Panda algorithm also changed how webmasters planning their SEO strategy, from keyword research and target, link building with relevant and high quality links can add value to a webpage.

With Google Panda asking for quality content, many webmaster figuring out what exactly qualifies as quality for the algorithm? Below there are questions to analyze if a website is penalty-free from Panda or not:

– Does the website have contained unique, interesting and detailed content?

– Does the website have duplicate content?

– Does the website has grammar or/and spelling errors, or website content is difficult to read because sentence structure?

– Does the content in website is original, or can’t be found in anywhere else?

– Would readers likely to bookmark/share the webpage or the website to others?

– Does the website has too many ads, distractions, or has theme that hard to navigate?

But even if the website affected by Google Panda, there’s still time to get back before the next major update rolls out. To avoid penalties, it’s very important to boost website quality. Another way that can be done are removing low quality pages, improving shallow or sparse content, publish original, in-depth content to add more value to the site and increasing chances to avoid penalties by Panda algorithm. When these very important changes have been made, wait for the next Panda refresh, every 4 to 6 weeks, and see if the site is back on track or still in the slump.