Google Panda 2 Update Happened in Last Week

According to Search Engine Land, Google has confirmed they ran the Panda 2 update last week.

For those not aware by now, the google panda updates have been a series of revisions the search engine giant rolled out in attempt to improve the quality of search results. The bulk of the changes were targeted at sites commonly referred to as content farms. This was a response to the increasing amount of high level search terms being dominated by pages with little or no content. In effect certain types of sites were gaming the system by creating pages that referenced topics in high demand. The content within those pages most often contained little or no meaningful information, and was being used merely as a means of generating thousands of page views.

The second phase of the panda roll out is aimed at content scraping. A common complaint of many webmasters who invest time and money in generating unique content, only to have it scraped and appear in duplicate form on several other sites beyond their control. If that wasn't bad enough, in many cases this stolen content has been ranking higher on these secondary sites than that of the original owner.

The Panda roll out timeline began in February this year and as of this latest release is in phase 2.2. Only time will tell what impact this new ranking algorithm has on the offending sites it aims to target.