Good morning, Search Marketer, Google's Panda algorithm update rolled out globally, in English, a decade ago.
Businesses and search professionals here in the U.S. got a taste of it about two months prior to the worldwide release as it went live domestically in February 2011. For those of you who, like myself, weren't in the industry back then, the Panda update was a milestone in search history because it was one of Google's most significant spam-targeting updates.
The Panda update, named after Google engineer Navneet Panda, made it harder for pages with thin content to rank well. This was bad news for sites that targeted long-tail queries by generating large volumes of similar content which were often only distinguishable from their other content due to subtle, and sometimes arbitrary, differences.
I like to think of Panda as a precursor to our modern core algorithm updates, and like those updates, it made a huge impact for many businesses: "I think we went from like a billion-dollar market cap to a six hundred million-dollar market cap overnight," said Eric Wu, VP of product growth at Honey Science, who was working at Demand Media at the time.
I do enjoy a trip down memory lane because what's past is prologue. Share your most memorable search industry-related moments with me, whether it was a particular campaign, client, update, or perhaps you met your spouse at SMX (a few have!!) — my email is gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com; use the subject line: In search of your most memorable moments.
George Nguyen,
Editor