Google Panda Update 3.4 Briefing 2012

Google Panda 3.4 has rolled out successfully with 50 major changes in the algorithm. A brief highlights of Panda 3.4 updates for March till April 3rd 2012.

March 23rd 2012, Google released the Google Panda 3.4 updates across the web. Interestingly, this announcement was made via Twitter. Lol :D

Here is the direct link to the tweet from Google.

Here is the snapshot from @Google .

The tweet says, the Panda update is going to affect approximately 1.6% of the search queries across the web. 
The naming 3.4 is yet not decided from just a few words from the tweet. Later this month(April 2012) Inside search blog released a News confirmation of 50 pack Panda refresh which happened across March. You can have a look at our previous article on "Layout Algorithm Update".

You can learn all the 50 major search quality highlights from that post. We will see a briefing and the ones which interests us the most and the ones which can be a boon/bane for bloggers in common.

1. High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements:

This is definitely a concern for many bloggers especially, if you are just writing outdated stuffs on your site. Freshness algorithm was previously installed for mainly News data, but now it has been installed for all search queries. Not just the freshness improvements, but also the high quality sites algorithm which can affect if you are not giving high quality stuffs on your pages. If the quality and uniqueness of your articles are par below the average level across the whole web then your pages may be ranked lower. Now, Google can easily detect, and rank quality sites higher with ease[The algorithm is in place]

Suggestion: Give unique titles and write unique contents which have not been written elsewhere. Sometimes, this is not possible[but suggests you to give the best when composing an article/tutorial to make it look original and informative]

2. More relevant image search results:

The algorithmic update for image search results is something really nice for people searching for images. But, as a blogger's point of view making images SEO friendly is important to get listed better. Now, a good news for Blogger community is the image results would be as relevant as possible even if the pages containing the images are of low quality. That's something cool from Google. 

3. Tweaks to handling of anchor text:

The recent panda update has created a scoring system to determine the quality of the anchor texts used to link pages. Anchor texts are nothing but the text which appears to the users for a given link.

The robust scoring system for anchor text would score a webpage or site lower if the site gets linked with irrelevant anchor texts. That's one of the prediction on the new algorithm.

4. Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages:

That's something to ponder upon when it comes to blogs and forums. This is with regards to "Freshness algorithm". Google can now easily detect the blog/forum's dates to deliver the results based on the queries.

5. Improvements to freshness in Video Universal:

If you have a quality video blog, then you are going to benefit out of this venture from Google. Stale videos will be pushed down the results and fresh videos will be listed higher now.

These were the 5 major highlights briefing for Google panda update 3.4. Hope you enjoyed reading it. Thanks for viewing it. Hope to catch you soon with more updates.

Categories: web