This is turning out to be a pretty big week in the SEO community as Google announces the release of version 2.0 of the Google Spam Algorithm, and a brand new Google Panda Algorithm (version 4.0). The Spam Algorithm was released over the weekend and confirmed by Matt Cutt’s yesterday via Twitter; while the new Panda 4.0 algorithm only went into effect late yesterday evening; so let’s start off with the update to the Google Spam Algorithm first.
The Spam Algorithm, also referred to as the Payday Loan Algorithm, specifically targets spammy queries such as payday loans, viagra, and other similar heavily spammed queries. Matt Cutts talked about this initially back in May of last year (link). Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineLand was able to get some commentary from Google regarding the latest update to the Spam Algorithm and what types of effects we should expect to see:
Google told us this specific update is an international rollout and it affects different languages to different degrees, but this impacts English queries by about 0.2% to a noticeable degree.
Now with that aside, last night Google’s Matt Cutt’s posted on Twitter announcing the launch of Panda 4.0:
Google is rolling out our Panda 4.0 update starting today.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 20, 2014
And much unlike the existing Panda algorithm which has been getting refreshed fairly often – this is a completely new Panda algorithm (hence the new version number). Since this was just released less than 24-hours ago there isn’t much statistics to go on yet to see just how large of a change the new algorithm makes – but I will be sure to keep everyone posted when some numbers do start coming in.
Also keep in mind that the new Panda algorithm will take a few days to fully go through the entire system – so you may start seeing different results from your office computer, while the same old ones at your home computer.