Another Google update enviability means Winners and Losers, this new update has been dubbed Panda 4.1 (although many of Google's other algorithms were updated) and news broke via Google employee Pierre Far's Google+ page. Medium and small websites are said to have benefitted most from 4.1, in the past Google has been accused of favouring the bigger players, but they expect to see the highest ranking sites to come in a variety of sizes now.

The Panda algorithm penalises content that it believes offers little or no value to users.  What is new about the latest Panda update is that Google has developed new and more sophisticated signals to more accurately detect low-quality and thin content from ranking highly,
although it's worth noting that 4.1 has only effected 3-5% of search queries. 

Losers

Gaming, lyric and some medical portals suffered organic search visibility losses, this seems to be because these sites tend to have thin, repeated, or aggregated content, and Google deems this type of content as low quality. Lyric websites often have identical content to their competitors, medical content sites have a habit of repeating content, while gaming sites have a lack of content compared to other platforms. Affiliate sites have also been deemed losers by many tech experts due to their thin content.

Winners

News websites, download portals and content sites benefitted due to the fact they are regularly updated with new, (presumably) high-quality and unique information. Another thing to note is that sites that were hit by the Panda 4.0 update have been working hard to delete duplicate and thin content over the past few months and as a result have recovered very well, examples include rd.com, Hotelguides.com and Yourtango.com.

Concerned about how this update may affect your website? Although it may seem that Google is trying to catch websites out, they're actually very clear with how they critique content. They suggest referring to the following questions when curating your own content;

  1. Would you trust the information presented in this article?
  2. Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well?
  3. Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
  4. Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
  5. Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?