Google’s latest updates to its search algorithm continue the crusade against spam, low-quality content

Google has made two notable changes to its search algorithm in the past 24 hours, both of which continue Google’s crusade to keep its search results relevant. The 4.0 release of the Google Panda algorithm is intended to make it more difficult for websites with poor quality to rank highly in search results (via SearchEngineLand).

Payday Loan Algorithm 2.0 was also released yesterday, and it targets “very spammy queries,” and is unrelated to Panda’s rollout:

Over the weekend we began rolling out a new algorithmic update. The update was neither Panda nor Penguin — it was the next generation of an algorithm that originally rolled out last summer for very spammy queries.

Both updates can potentially affect ranking in Google Search, though the impact does seem to be limited. For instance, Panda affects a different percentage of searches for each language. For searches in English, Google reports that roughly 7.5% of all searches will see different results as a result of the updated algorithm.

The Payday Loan Algorithm 2.0 is slightly harder to quantify, though it is an update to an algorithm that has been in place since last summer. That algorithm affected roughly 0.3% of US searches, though that percentage was drastically higher elsewhere around the globe. This update to the Payday Loan Algorithm affects US queries by 0.2%, according to Google.

Image credit: SearchEngineLand