According to several online sources, Google released its 25th Panda update on March 14, but the search engine giant has hinted that it will no longer be using Twitter or any other medium to announce or confirm its changes.

Speaking to the website Search Engine Land, a spokesperson from Google said:

“I don’t expect us to tweet about or confirm current or future Panda updates because they’ll be incorporated into our indexing process and thus be more gradual.”

Since their introduction in February 2011, Google’s Panda updates have been introduced roughly once a month and have either been announced in advance or confirmed shortly afterwards. The first update had an effect on over a tenth of Google queries, but the updates since have rarely troubled more than 2% of them.

The algorithm alterations seek to help the search engine to favour “high quality” sites. On its blog, Google has a bullet-pointed list of attributes that make for a strong site, with factors such as good spelling and grammar, insightful and balanced content, trustworthiness and avoiding redundant, duplicate content being among them. Google says just a handful of poor quality pages can have a detrimental effect on the rankings of a whole site.

With Panda updates seemingly no longer to be carried out manually and instead becoming gradually integrated into its usual algorithm updates, it should mean changes to search results are less noticeable and that those who have a sound knowledge of what Google prefers should suffer fewer sudden fluctuations in their search rankings, as their sites will already have been put together with Google’s behaviour in mind.

The upshot is that search engine optimisation expertise and knowledge is likely to become increasingly vital in maintaining strong search engine rankings, meaning that using a professional SEO company is likely to help keep a business’ online presence a step ahead of its competitors.

John Murray

John is every inch the wordsmith and loves a game of Scrabble above all else. With experience writing for newspapers, John’s time at university was spent studying Creative Writing – something which comes across in his love of the pun.