Webmasters and publishers the world over have been anxiously awaiting the global roll out of Google’s new Panda update ever since they rolled it out in the US earlier this year. That day came this week with Google announcing in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog that they have rolled out the update globally to all English-language Google users.
“We will continue testing and refining the change before expanding to additional languages, and we’ll be sure to post an update when we have more to share,” says Google’s Amit Singhal.
Amit Singhal also says Google has incorporated “new user feedback signals”.
“In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms,” he says. “In addition, this change also goes deeper into the ‘long tail’ of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.”
It would be very interesting to know Google’s definition of a high-confidence situation and what websites would classify as high-confidence. Google has said in the past that it would look at making domain blocking as a signal but that if they did so it would be very carefully done.
Amit Singhal also says “Based on our testing, we’ve found the algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality. If you believe your site is high-quality and has been impacted by this change, we encourage you to evaluate the different aspects of your site extensively.”
A lot of webmasters have been doing this so it will be interesting to see what effect this latest update will have on a global scale.