Despite the fact that Google reported they would no longer verify algorithm changes, they have gone ahead and done just that. In a recent post on Search Engine Land it was reported that Google has confirmed what many marketers already believed to be a change to the Panda update which was pushed out last month. The post reports that this change will be rolled out over a ten day period and will improve the rankings of several sites which suffered as a result of the last Panda change.
This update, however, is a softening to the number and type of sites which were affected. Many sites which were considered low to mid quality properties experienced a major drop with the last update, but now they are starting to show a comeback. Of course, this doesn’t mean that low quality sites are acceptable in the eyes of Google, just that they feel they took it a little bit too far. For now.
The focus from Google continues to be on promoting high-quality sites which provide users with the content they want. It seems reasonable to believe that these sites which are now recovering from the previous Panda update will want to focus on improving their overall quality or they might find themselves right back at the bottom of the SERPs in the months to come.
While nothing was confirmed on the specific numbers of sites that will be effected by this change, it is reasonable that it will be a fairly small percentage of the total number which were affected by the main change several weeks ago.
One last curiosity about this update is why Google decided to confirm the change was being made despite the fact that they already had reported they would no longer verify these types of updates. Was this just part of a mistake in the scope of the Panda 2.0 update? Are they just going to selectively confirm and deny future updates? It will be interesting to see what happens with any future changes.
