Google updates its Panda search engine algorithm

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has updated its search engine algorithm, codenamed Panda, to version 2.5, affecting the rankings of millions of web sites around the world.

The update is the first in nearly two months, marking one of Google's longest periods between Panda updates this year, according to findings by Searchengineland.

Reports suggest that Google stealthily updated Panda early last week, some suggesting it was either Tuesday or Wednesday, but Google didn't confirm the update until several days later.

"We're continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users," Google said in a statement. "This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year."

While Google makes many search changes on a regular basis, not all of them are as significant as updates to the Panda algorithm. It released Panda 1.0 in February, and a second version seven weeks later in April. Since then we've seen several smaller updates leading to last week's release.

The introduction of Panda is perhaps the biggest change to Google's search engine in years, completely upsetting the previous rankings of millions of web sites and making it an important change for web sites dependent on Google search traffic.

Lower quality web sites that used heavy search engine optimisation to bump up their placements were put further down the list, while high quality web sites that did not try to artificially increase their rankings were bumped towards the top of search results.

It's not clear what Google has changed in this most recent update, but we can probably be assured that the days of filling web sites with tag words to get noticed by Google's web spiders will become a thing of the past. µ