Google Panda is now officially part of Google’s core ranking algorithm.

This may come as a surprise to some SEOs and webmasters since Google was supposed to announce its major Google Penguin update last month and there’s already a delay on that.

So what is Google Panda?

A Panda Guide was posted by Jennifer Slegg, from The SEM Post, announcing Panda as a part of Google’s core ranking algorithm. In that guide, she shares the below statement they received from a Google spokesperson:

“Panda is an algorithm that’s applied to sites overall and has become one of our core ranking signals. It measures the quality of a site, which you can read more about in our guidelines. Panda allows Google to take quality into account and adjust ranking accordingly.”

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed this on Twitter.

Now that we know the algo update took place, here are the 7 things you need to know about Panda:

1. It is NOT recommended to remove thin content on your website to clean up from Panda. This can cause more harm than good as you may lose traffic.
2. Using Search Analytics in Google Search Console is a good way to determine what pages are getting traffic, and to identify potential candidates for content that need improving due to zero Google referral traffic.
3. Adding new content to a site is a great solution to Panda.
4. A site with only a handful of low quality pages can still be considered an overall great site. There should be little worry if a few pages are lower quality than the rest.
5. Great comments show that a webpage has a lot of visitors that are engaging, but lower quality comments can drag the overall page quality down on a page.
6. Panda and duplicate content are two separate and independent things. Duplicate content isn’t a part of Panda.
7. Panda-hit sites can still rank. If a site had quality content on a page, those pages can continue to rank.

Now that you’re all caught up on the new Panda update, go implement some changes! How do you feel about the update? Is there anything that has you worried? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below!