Do Not Disturb: Panda Sleeping

This is a guest post from Daniel Laming who is the webmaster for the UK online casino website www.biggainsnopains.co.uk.

Hoorah! I’m sure many of you will have heard already, but for those of you who have not, Google has recently updated its’ Twitter feed confirming that there will be no more changes to their algorithm until after the New Year has passed.

Although you would expect everyone to be celebrating a long-awaited break and enjoying their chance to sit back and relax over the festive period, it seems that for some, this was quite an unwelcome announcement. Many sites that feel they have been penalized without good cause in the recent Panda updates, will have to wait for a reprieve until 2012. Unfortunately for them however, Google was unlikely to ever make changes at this time of year due to an earlier ‘incident’ way back in 2003 around the Christmas Holiday time.

In 2003, many large corporate online retailers and websites were left livid when Google decided to update its’ algorithms by installing, what has now become known as, the ‘Florida’ update. Rather than having the desired effect, which would have been just a few minor changes to their search engine rankings, it essentially replaced the majority of top ranking sites in the Top 10 with sites that were less relevant and more questionable options. With most of these retailers losing a lot of money, Google seems to have decided to learn from its’ mistakes and no longer make changes so close to the Holiday period.

But, rather than go on about Google’s quiet before a potential storm, I thought I’d look back on the year and just recap on all those updates we have been subjected to. Starting from January and ending in December – here’s how 2011 panned out in the Search Engine world.

January 28^th 2011 – Update number 1 Minor changes affecting spammers and poor sites

February 23^rd 2011 – Panda goes live. Poor content sites and low relevance sites hit hardest

March 30^th 2011 – Google’s +1 is released in an effort to better connect them with Social Media

April 11^th 2011 – Panda 2.0 set live for all English-speaking results across the globe

May 9^th 2011 – Panda 2.1 – A minor set of changes just to reinforce the original 2.0 update

June 2^nd 2011 – Search engines give more ‘structure to data’ having collaborated together

June 21^st 2011 – Panda 2.2 is launched – further targeting poor content sites and spammers

June 28^th 2011 – The first launch of Google+ – the next stage in their Social Media developments

July 23^rd 2011 – Panda 2.3 – effectively more of the same thing

August 12^th 2011 – Panda 2.4 – the release of Panda for all non-speaking English results is now live

August 16^th 2011 – Site Links Expanded within the Google Results

September 15^th 2011 – Basic Pagination changes occur including several rel=”x” functions

September 21^st 2011 – Minor algorithm updates with only small effects ensuing

September 28^th 2011 – Panda 2.5 – No-one actually knows what this was but guessing the same

October 5^th 2011 – Panda has some minor updates – search results fluctuate a little then settle

October 18^th 2011 – Search results are encrypted but this doesn’t lead to the desired effect

November 3^rd 2011 – Google releases ‘Freshness’ update – one of their largest updates to date

November 14^th 2011 – Some more basic algorithm changes – nothing major

November 18^th 2011 – Panda 3.0 Release! Updates now becoming more frequent – same guidelines

December 1^st 2011 – Freshness update release 2 – Google makes minor adjustments to Panda

So that’s about it for 2011 – stay tuned for the exciting and presumably excruciating developments set to take place in 2012. Remember – just keep your content worthy and your site clean, that way you can expect some good results in the New Year.

Merry Xmas Google and a Happy New Year to all,

Daniel Laming

Webmaster for www.biggainsnopains.co.uk