Today is a day no SEO and many webmasters will never forget, it is the day Google launched their Panda algorithm. On February 24, 2011, three years ago today, Google changed the SEO space forever by building an algorithm that would downgrade low-value content.
Panda had a larger impact on Google's search results than most, if not all, search quality related algorithms in Google's history. SEOs may argue that Penguin was felt more, and it likely was by SEOs, especially after Panda, but Panda probably had a wider imprint.
Since then, we had about 25 Panda refreshes and updates, here are some:
- Panda #25 on March 15, 2013
- Panda #24 on January 22, 2013
- Panda #23 on December 21, 2012
- Panda #22 on November 21st
- Panda #22 on November 21st
- Panda #21 on November 5th
- Panda #20 on September 27th
- Panda 3.9.2 on September 18th
- Panda 3.9.1 on August 20th
- Panda 3.9 on July 24th
- Panda 3.8 on June 25th
- Panda 3.7 on June 9th
- Panda 3.6 on April 27th
- Panda 3.5 on April 19th
- Panda 3.4 on March 23rd
- Panda 3.3 on about February 26th
- Panda 3.2 on about January 15th
- Panda 3.1 on November 18th
- Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th
- Panda 2.5.2 on October 13th
- Panda 2.5.1 on October 9th
- Panda 2.5 on September 28th
- Panda 2.4 in August
- Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd.
- Panda 2.2 on June 18th or so.
- Panda 2.1 on May 9th or so.
- Panda 2.0 on April 11th or so.
- Panda 1.0 on February 24th
Google stopped confirming Panda updates last year and then started doing rolling updates but that doesn't mean they haven't done work on fine tuning the algo. They softened it recently and there have been refreshes monthly, some larger than others but it is hard to know if it was Panda or something else.
Anyway, Panda is a significant update that is still felt today throughout our space.
Forum discussion at Google+.
