Google Panda Update Overview:

According to Google’s official journal post once Panda launch,

This update is designed to scale back rankings for low quality sites, sites that square measure low value add for users, copy content from different websites or sites that square measure simply not terribly helpful. At identical time, it will give higher rankings for high quality sites, sites with original content and data like analysis, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and then on.

Basically, Panda updates area unit designed to focus on pages that are not essentially spam however are not nice quality. This was the primary ever penalty that went when “thin content,” and also the sites that were hit hardest by the 1st Panda update were content farms (hence why it had been originally referred to as the Farmer update), wherever users may publish dozens of low-quality, keyword stuffed articles that offered very little to no real worth for the reader. Several publishers would submit a similar article to a bunch of those content farms simply to urge additional links.

Panda may be a website wide penalty, which implies that if “enough” (no specific number) pages of your website were flagged for having skinny content, your entire website can be penalized. Panda was additionally supposed to prevent scrappers (sites that will republish alternative company’s content) from outranking the first author’s content.

Here could be a go down of all the Panda updates and their release dates. If your site’s traffic took a serious hit around one between these times there's a well probability it had been flagged by Panda

Google Panda

• 1.0 (aka the Farmer Update) on 24/02/2011
• 2.0 Update on 11/04/2011. (Panda impacts all English speaking countries)
• 2.1 Update on 9/05/2011.
• 2.2 Update on 18/06/2011.
• 2.3 Update on around 22/07/2011.
• 2.4 Update in 08/2011(Panda goes international)
• 2.5 Update on 28/09/2011
• 2.5.1 Update on 9/10/2011
• 2.5.2 Update on 13/10/2011
• 2.5.3 Update on 19/10/2011 and 20/10/2011
• 3.1 Update on 18/11/2011
• 3.2 Update on about 15/01/2012
• 3.3 Update on about 26/02/2012
• 3.4 Update on 23/03/2012
• 3.5 Update on 19/04/2012
• 3.6 Update on 27/04/2012
• 3.7 Update on 8/06/2012
• 3.8 Update on 25/06/2012
• 3.9 Update on 24/07/2012
• 3.9.1 Update on 20/08/2012
• 3.9.2 Update on 18/10/2012
• Google Panda Update #20 on 27/09/2012 (overlapped the EMD Update)
• Google Panda Update #21 on 5/11/2012
• Google Panda Update #22 on 4/12/2012
• Google Panda #23 Update on 21/12/2012
• Google Panda #24 Update on January 22/01/2013

Search Engine Land recently created this nice Google Panda update info graphic to assist walk website homeowners through the various versions of the Google Panda updates.

Many website owners complained that even once they created changes to their sites so as to be additional “Panda friendly,” their sites did not mechanically recover. Panda updates do not happen at regular intervals, and Google does not re-index each website every time, therefore some website homeowners were forced to take care of low traffic for many months till Google got around to re-crawling their web site and being attentive of any positive changes.