If you pay any attention to SEO at all, you will often hear words like Panda, Penguin, and Antelope tossed around. Well OK, not the last one. If you do some digging, you can find out literally millions of blog posts and articles about the changes and how they rock the face of the internet upon release. Well, the big G is at it again! This time they released a smaller update to their Panda algorithm. Here is a quick explanation of what these original algo updates were- I will put them into terms a business owners or lay person can understand, and then link to the more complex and in-depth explanation.

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2. New Google Algorithm Update: Panda 4.0 Released
May 19th, 2014
virginiaseo.org/blog/new-google-algorithm-update-panda-4-0-released-may-19-2014/
Chris Dill
New Google Algorithm Update: Panda 4.0 Released May 19th
If you pay any attention to SEO at all, you will often hear words like Panda, Penguin, and Antelope
tossed around. Well OK, not the last one. If you do some digging, you can find out literally millions of
blog posts and articles about the changes and how they rock the face of the internet upon release.
Well, the big G is at it again! This time they released a smaller update to their Panda algorithm. Here is
a quick explanation of what these original algo updates were- I will put them into terms a business
owners or lay person can understand, and then link to the more complex and in-depth explanation.
Panda
Panda Update – Feb. 23, 2011
You can read the official Q & A with Google here.
The Panda update was put into place to combat so-called “thin” content. This affected roughly 12% of
all internet searches- so it was a big one. Thin content is when a web page was designed only to
promote links, or cluttered with ads, or containing duplicate and un-valuable content. This was
Google’s answer to SEO companies gaming the system by creating huge websites full of rubbish and
using them to rank sites that were only designed to generate ad traffic or affiliate clicks.
Penguin

3. Penguin Update – Apr. 23, 2012
The Penguin is known as the SEO update. This update was designed specifically to combat spam and
negative SEO. This update devalued sites with large quantities of bad links, keyword stuffing, and
other spammy behavior. If your site had 1000 links to it from another site which had 1 million outbound
links, that site and most likely your site would have been affected. Here is a good article on Penguin
between Search Engine Land and Googler Matt Cutts.
All Updates
All Updates – 2000 – Current
If you are interested in this sort of thing, feel free to check out Moz’s big list of all algorithm updates,
which is pretty awesome.
As you can see, there have been a lot of upgrades and changes to the way Google views your site,
and the way they rank your site compared to that of your competition whether that is on a local or
global scale. A lot of small business owners were put out of business with the Penguin update, losing
their entire business when their spammy website got pushed to page 300.
Enter Panda Update 4.0 – May 19th, 2014
While experts say that it might only have affected 7.5% of queries using the English language, that
really won’t matter to you if your site got hit.
Moz author Peter Meyers posted an interesting blog post about it here, in which he tracks the changes
to a couple of large online storefronts such as ebay.com and Amazon.com. It is probably too early to
tell exactly what changes the algo update brings, but we can certainly speculate, track, and comment.
I manage a web property which was hit- and it is fully a legit site. The site itself was managed by a

4. blogger who did not know or care about SEO until recently. As such, there were lots of mistaken
duplicate posts, thin content, and broken links. For instance when a revised product was released, the
blog owner copied the old product content into the new post, and left the old post up. A recent switch
from Blogger to WordPress was successful, when all of a sudden the sites search queries
plummeted… only to rise and fall again. As you can see from the chart, Google has been messing
around behind the wheel. Moz.com states that they released a smaller algo update on May 16th which
was aimed at and nicknamed the Payday Loan Update.
As you can clearly see from the chart, we started working on the site mid April and all was well until
May 15/16 which is when the trouble started to happen. We have currently adjusted some links,
removed some parameters, and added some canonical links to duplicate content to fight the affect of
these two updates. I do not personally believe that this is something to be worried about, and I do think
this scale will go back to normal shortly.
The reason I believe this is that the traffic for the site through Google Analytics has continued to
maintain/rise, and sales are where they should be. To be honest this chart above does not really even
concern me one bit, until I notice something else on the site slipping or get an alert from Google.
This Website
A small update: This website took a plummet in SERPs right before the 16th, but has since risen back
to the top for even more keywords than we originally held. It would seem that this small update has
pumped some extra blood back into Virginia SEO!
Chris Dill
SEO Expert at Virginia SEO
Christopher Dill is a Christian entrepreneur who loves web design, marketing, and
anything on a computer. He is the creator and author of The Dill Design, a local
Virginia web design company. He also runs Virginia SEO, which is a SEO and inbound
marketing company. Chris is currently finishing up his Master of Information Systems at University of
Phoenix, and works by day as a Senior Network Engineer.
Latest posts by Chris Dill (see all)
New Google Algorithm Update: Panda 4.0 Released May 19th, 2014 - May 27,
2014
Why Your Business Needs to Consider Inbound Marketing - May 10, 2014
Content Is King – Why the Future of SEO Depends on It - May 7, 2014