How Will Google’s Panda 4.0 Affect You?

As SEO agencies and marketers, our job is to be aware of any Google update which could potentially change some rules of the ranking game. However, over the weekend, one simple tweet by Matt Cutts on May 20, 2014, confirmed a change to Google’s current algorithm – Panda 4.0.
Although a big update was expected from Google since last year, the speed to which it was implemented was quite drastic compared to older updates. What is Google Panda 4.0? It is an update meant to filter out low-quality websites with little or poor content. In other words, Panda 4.0 is designed to prevent websites containing low quality content from obtaining a high Google ranking and search result. Because Panda 4.0 is an actual change in Google algorithm, Panda 4.0 will now identify and filter sites differently than before.
How about Payday Loan 2.0?
Beginning in 2013, the original Payday Loan was meant to target “spammy queries”. With more than a 0.3% impact on U.S. queries, the Payday Loan was a lighter prevention against spammy queries. However, the updated Payday Loan 2.0, unrelated to Panda or Penguin updates, targets “very spammy queries”. While this new update was meant more for international SEO, it will affect different languages to different degrees, meaning that English queries will see an impact greater than 0.2%.
So, who did these updates affect?
The most affected to date since the update has actually been eBay. In just three days, their ranking has dropped from #6 to #25 in Top 10 Rankings produced by Moz.
Just recovering from being hacked, these news will surely not sit well with eBay.
Which keywords did eBay lose?
Thanks to RefuGeeks, using SEMrush, we can see eBay has a larger amount of keywords lost to keywords gained.
Below are the full list of keywords which have held a decline in rankings for eBay.com
Obviously, Google’s updates are doing their job of filtering out low quality websites, but what does this mean for your business? Follow us as we update how these Google algorithms change the ranking game.
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