Google Panda Update 20 Released with Impact on 2.4% of English Queries

Google confirmed on Thursday, 27 September 2012, that they have released a Panda algorithm update. This is the 20th Panda update and thus it is named Panda 20. It is a fairly major Panda update that impacts 2.4% of English search queries and is still rolling out. Late Friday afternoon, Google announced a EMD (Exact Match Domain) update that removed the chances of a low-quality exact match domain from ranking well in Google. But over the weekend, many non-exact match domain site owners noticed their rankings dropped as well. What was it?

Google confirmed that they pushed out a new Panda algorithm update that is not just a data refresh but an algorithm update. Google told us this "affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice." There is more to come with this update, where Google promises to roll out more to this Panda algorithm update over the next 3-4 days. Here is the comment Google's Matt Cutts sent us after asking about this update

Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 27 Sep 12. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday, 27 September 2012, but the full roll-out is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example). The sad part is that there are many sites affected by either this Panda update or the EMD update and it is hard to know which update you were hurt by.

Google changed Link Evaluation criteria

What exactly did Google announce?
Google announced several changes of the ranking algorithm. The most important change was the change of the backlink analysis:

"Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often re-architect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable."

What does this mean for your web page rankings?
Unfortunately, Google doesn't go into detail. As mentioned in Google's statement, Google uses "characteristics of links" to figure out the topic of a linked page.

Characteristics of Links
We'll take a look at the characteristics below. Then we'll try to find out which element could have been changed.

Characteristic 1: the text of the link
The anchor text of a link has been the most important factor for a long time. If many sites link to a page with the anchor text "green apple" then the page will get high rankings for the term "green apple".

Characteristic 2: the link power of the linking page
Links from pages with many inbound links have a higher influence than links from pages with few backlinks.

Characteristic 3: content and page proximity
If you sell shoes on your website then the link to your website will have a bigger impact if the text that surrounds the link to your page is about shoes. If the link to your website is surrounded by totally unrelated text then the link won't count as much.

Characteristic 4: link attributes such as nofollow and title
Links that use the rel=nofollow attribute don't affect the position of your web pages on Google. Some webmasters think that using title attributes can have a positive effect if these contain the targeted keywords. Others think that this could trigger a spam filters.

Characteristic 5: redirects and shortened URLs
Redirects and shortened URLs such as http://bit.ly/a4X4th are URLs that redirect to another URL. Should these URLs carry full weight when it comes to calculate the position of a website?

Characteristic 6: the age of a website
The older a link is, the more Google tends to trust that link. Links that remain for a long time seem to have a bigger impact than links that come and go.

Characteristic 7: the affiliation of the linking sites
Links from websites that have the same owner and links from affiliates may have a different influence on the rankings of a web page than links from websites that are not affiliated with the page.

Of course, we can only speculate what Google has changed. It is likely that Google now only considers the anchor text of a link if that link is placed in the right context (page and content proximity). Another possibility is that affiliate links (redirected or with page variables) will have less influence on the rankings of a page. If you have followed the tips and tricks of this newsletter in the past then Google's change won't have any negative influence on your website rankings. Just continue to get good backlinks and optimize the content of your pages. You can analyze the different links that point to a website here.

References:
Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February
Google Changes How It Evaluates Links
How Google evaluates links: 7 characteristics