Google’s solution to this issue was to make one of the greatest improvements to the algorithm in years to come. The update was renamed Google Panda. Despite the cute term, it will create big problems for webmasters and SEO practitioners who have used these techniques.
The move was targeted, in particular, at content farms – websites that run thousands of low-quality articles with the primary goal of dominating Google’s search results and selling banner ads on the back.
Google originally carried out panda rank updates on a monthly basis. This meant that once a month there was a big shake-up of Google’s search results, and several blogs would discover that their search places had fallen dramatically. Many pages suddenly underwent a Google Panda punishment and took a massive hit in their rankings. The upgrade caused tremendous harm to companies such as Demand Media, which had based their entire business model on content farms.
Nowadays, Google Panda releases are taking place subtly and behind the scenes as part of Google’s daily update, but there are no drastic shake-ups that once happened. However, the Panda algorithm continues to run silently, meaning that low-quality content farms cannot control Google’s search results. Goog tries to make quiet improvements behind the scenes to make sure that its algorithms are impossible to manipulate.