OP Approved - brief was "Please provide me with 750 words on the differences between Google Penguin and Panda updates with correctly formatted BB code to be placed in BHW."
OP then provided the following - priyankanx
Penguin and Panda - What is the difference?
If you are someone who closely deals with websites and SEO, Google Penguin and Google Panda Updates would not sound unfamiliar. Right from their day of launch, speculations have been rife, but for those who are new to this industry, they may have many questions in their mind like what updates are these actually and what is the purpose they serve, and last but not the least, what is the difference between them?
Before we start diving into details, it would be good to start with a basic introduction to act as foundation. We all know that Google is the king of all search engines. Google constantly strives to improve the quality and relevance of search results it returns in response to the keywords a user searches for. It is obvious that we have millions and billions of sites, and while most are genuine, some are spam and others are with very poor quality content. The job is to show the best and most relevant results from this ocean of websites, and to achieve that end, Google has come up with different algorithms. Google update these algorithms regularly and Penguin and Panda are part of these updates.
Google Panda
The update called Google Panda was launched on Feb, 2011. Formerly known as "Farmer Update", it was created to filter the sites containing tons of poor quality content, put together to rank well. This is belief of most SEO professionals that Panda update affected those sites that had problem with low quality content as Google didn't find any valid reason to show such sites in top search results. Sites with duplicate or thin content or those full of advertisements were the ones that saw tremendous decline in the rankings after this update came into effect.
What is important about Google Panda update is that it happens to be a site wide penalty. This means if some of the pages in a site have duplicate or thin content, it is not only those specific pages that would be penalized, rather the whole site containing these pages may be penalized despite some pages on the site being high quality. The sites that had high bounce rates were also known to be affected.
Majority of SEO professionals believe that the primary factors for the Panda update are as follows:
- Thin content, that is not enough content
- Bounce rates
- A lot of low quality content, put together to improve the rankings
The "anything goes" ended with this Google Update. It was first algorithm by Google targeting the thin content. Many hugely popular sites like About.com also ended up affected by this Update and saw big decline in both revenue and traffic post this update.
Google Penguin
Launched on April, 2012 for the first time, Penguin Update was referred to as Over Optimization Penalty. This update targeted sites involved in over optimizing to improve their rankings and basically involved sites who were employing Black Hat SEO techniques, including cloaking and keyword stuffing. A lot of SEO professionals were of belief that the primary reason for Panda update loss was getting low/poor quality link with keyword as the anchor text so as to manipulate the rankings.
As per Google, 3.1 per cent of queries were affected by the very first Penguin update as against 1 per cent of Panda's very first update.
Google is yet to make it clear on what is their focus or what are they specifically aiming at with the Penguin Update. Websites affected are yet to know as to why their rankings have been affected by the Penguin update.
Yet, majority of SEO professionals believe that the primary factors for the Penguin update are as follows:
- Low /poor quality links
- Over optimization
- Keyword stuffing
- Overusing exact match domains
Conclusion
Google keeps updating its algorithms regularly and it obviously is a difficult task to keep track of each and every update. So what is it you can do to make sure your rankings are not affected? Well, the rule of thumb is that create high-quality content which your users would love and Google would be happy too, because ultimately Google also wants its users to be happy.
What follows here is quick overview of the differences between the two:
Aim
Panda: Target websites with poor, thin and duplicate content
Penguin: Target webspams or those sites that fail to follow the laid guidelines
Causing Factors
Panda:
- Thin content
- Bounce rates
- Tons of low quality content
Penguin:
- Low /poor quality links
- Over optimization
- Keyword stuffing
- Overusing exact match domains
No. of Updates
Panda: Over 25 updates
Penguin: 4 updates
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