The Panda update for Google Search regularly gets new refreshes and updates, so much so that the company now rarely announces them due to this increased frequency.
So frequent are these algorithm changes that Google sometimes makes multiple changes in a day.
But now we have a clear announcement about this latest revision, including a new version number (4.0), meaning that new update is probably a very significant one. In fact, the algorithm seems to have been updated instead of just simply tweaked.
And this opens up the possibility of some big shuffles in search ranking soon.
Google’s resident web spam destroyer, Matt Cutts tweeted the news about Google Panda 4.0:
“Google is rolling out our Panda 4.0 update starting today.”
Talking to Search Engine Land, the company said that this new version of Panda affects different languages to different degrees. The other update actually concerns ‘payday loans’ search terms, which were first touched upon around a year back.
Although too early to accurately gauge the full effect, sites are definitely feeling the impact of these new algorithm updates. Some are reporting significant jump in rankings and traffic.
However, eBay seems to have lost rankings, and has dropped out of top ten for a number of different queries. Surely, not good news for sellers on eBay, but then again, it is very unlikely that Google was specifically targeting eBay with either of these two updates.