You heard it right. Yes, the Google’s Panda 4.0 is officially out now and has been made effective on the Google search results. The news spread like a wild fire with just a tweet of Matt Cutts on twitter saying, “Google is rolling out our Panda 4.0 update starting today.” The Panda algorithm was originally designed to bring up the sites with high quality content while turning down the ones with low quality ones in the Google search results. This helps the searchers to get the best results for the information they are looking for.

According to the rumors and early updates, it has been observed that people are experiencing decrease in their traffic. That is not all as this is just the beginning of what this deadly new update is capable of and the whole blogging community seems to be in chaos. Before moving on to “what’s new” in this update, it is better to explain first what Panda algorithm is all about.

Google Panda- Google’s Algorithm

For those who are not aware of what Google Panda is, well, it is a Google’s Algorithm that sorts out and ranks different websites according to the quality of the content. The main purpose of this algorithm is to refine the searches and push down the websites with low quality content while promoting and ranking high the quality content websites.

There are other algorithms as well that look after the search results like Google Hummingbird, EMD update, Google Penguin and many others which are hardly know to the public.

The Panda was first introduced and implemented in February 2011. This was the Google’s response to the criticism it received about how the well content websites were ranking. Google later declared that they internally named it as the Big Panda Update and this was named after the Navneet Panda, the engineer who designed and created it.

So What’s New in Panda 4.0?

Google Panda 4.0, as compared to the previous ones, is a major update with numerous changes and a bit altered way of ranking data on the internet. This algorithm seems to be smarter than the previous versions, making it hard to tackle and use the cheap tricks or what we call the “black hat SEO”. The changes made in this algorithm enable it to identify the spams more efficiently than the previous versions.

Google also explained that Panda 4.0 would additionally; assess the different global languages queries differently.  For instance, in English, the update impacted about 7.5 percent of the search queries that for daily regular users won’t pass by unnoticed.

Few months ago, Google integrated that Panda Algorithm updates will be less noticeable and “softer Panda” will appear. However, it did not happen, rather, the softer Panda turned out as an extensive one, casting both positive and negative impact.

As for the future, looking at Google’s past record, it is likely to make more improvements in its Panda, Penguin and other algorithms. Content with good and quality content are thus the instruments to achieve higher ranking.