Presented at InnoTech Oregon 2013. All rights reserved.

1. Google’s Panda Algorithm
Make that big bad bear chew bamboo for
you.
Michael Cottam
me@michaelcottam.com
www.michaelcottam.com
@Michael512
2 May 2013

2. What is Panda?
• Not a bear.
• Meet Navneet Panda, a Google Engineer

3. Seriously, why “Panda”?
• Danny Sullivan called the algo
change “Farmer”
– Targeting content “farms”
(eHow, article factories, etc.)
• Sorry Danny, that’s BORING
• Navneet Panda was a key
engineer on that team
• He’s a machine learning guy

4. Panda is:
• A new ranking factor
– NOT a new algorithm on its own
– NOT a manual penalty
• Overall idea: use an estimation of “quality”
of the content as a ranking factor
• So…does it penalize or boost sites?

5. Dissection of the Panda
• Human quality raters rate pages
• Machine learning: what’s common
between pages that suck?
– Or that rock?
• Tweak the algo, and see if the new
results have better sites in the top
spots
– Feb 23 2011 Panda 1.0 - affected 12%
of search results

6. 2+ Years of algo changes:
it’s not all Panda
• Over 500 little updates to the algo/year
• Penguin (of course)
• Reduction in impact of EMDs
• Venice (“local universal” results)
• # of results from the same domain
• Emanuel Update: penalty for DMCA take-
downs
• Knowledge Graph
• Parked domains
• Search + Your World
• Freshness update
• Rel=next, rel=prev for pagination

7. What
is “quality”?
– Thin affiliates
– Scraper sites
– Sites with excessive ads
• Especially above-the-fold
– Made-For-Adsense
– Thin price-comparison sites

8. Grrrr….make Panda angry
• http://www.fixya.com/support/t6451689-switch_

9. Mmmm…make Panda happy
Quality, measured by:
• Low bounce rate
• Dwell time on site
• Original content (inc. images!)
• LOTS of content
• Rich content (maps, video, pics)
• Trust signals
• Expert/authority signals

10. Google Dance/Panda Dance
• The Bear Dances Slowly
• Each page gets a quality “score”
• Calculations to come up with scores for all
pages in the Google index takes WEEKS
• Algo hasn’t changed much, but…
• “Data refresh” comes every month or two
•Last one was supposed to be March 18th
•Panda is getting rolled into the main algo

11. Make that furball chew FOR you
• Rich content
• Consolidate similar pages
• Consolidate paginated content
• Maximize content above the fold
• Use original images
Examples:
• Best time to visit Tahiti
• Corvair at Keels
• BMW M1 at Monterey

12. References
• Navneet Panda’s resume:
http://www.shmula.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/navneet-panda-go
• SEOmoz chart of Google algo changes:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
• Matt Cutts video: “quality raters don’t affect the algo directly”:
http://searchengineland.com/video-google-speaks-about-
search-quality-raters-119986
• Google’s public declaration of what makes quality in a page:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-
guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
• Google’s reverse image search:
http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en
• Great reference on Panda from .NET Magazine:
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/10-things-you-need-
know-about-google-panda-and-penguin
• Library of recent Panda update articles from SEL:
• http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-panda-
update