Search giant Google confirmed this week that it had rolled out the newest version of its Panda search quality algorithm this week, but so far, the impact on search results is little. Google reported through its Twitter feed that about one percent of searches had been affected by the changes.
Panda 3.9.1 was the first update from Google for August 2012. Panda 3.9 was launched in July. Google stated that the number of search queries that were affected by both Panda updates were in the area of one percent. However, 3.9 did come with what is referred to as an ‘enough to notice’ tag from Google.
At SES in San Francisco last week, Google’s Matt Cutts stated that future Panda updates are not as likely to be big in the future. This could be seen as good news for SEOs and content marketers, but future Penguin updates are going to have more of an impact. Google has not done an update to Penguin since 1.1 was rolled out in the spring.
After the recent Panda announcement, Google noted its blog post from May about how websites can continue to rank well no matter what is in the Panda updates. The company stated that developing site content with a high degree of quality and offering the highest user experience is the key element to keep a strong Google presence as new algorithms continue to be released.