The most recent Panda update was June 21, 2011, so there has been some time for the dust to settle from the latest round of Google changes to its search algorithms. More webmasters are being careful to create content that allows their websites to not be labeled as content farms and consequently suffer negative search engine rankings.

Panda may very well be the biggest change to search algorithms in over a decade and people need to be cognizant of the “rules” regarding Panda and how best to respond to the changes in a positive manner. The big adjustment to the Panda update is the need to adjust to a machine making the rules rather than human response.

Humans determine what a quality website needs in regards to quality information. They look for search results that follow those guidelines and create ratings that are used as a training mechanism for the machines that take over the search process. Machines take these search ratings and rapidly scan the web to identify websites that follow the guidelines for a quality website and group those sites together into one cluster. Unfortunately, the same process is applied to websites that match the characteristics of a low quality website.

When Panda was released there were some high quality sites that were unfairly lumped into the cluster of low quality websites. That is unfortunate because you hate to see quality work suddenly ranking low because of the power of one search engine. However, Google is committed to Panda and consistently working to make the algorithm better. The idea behind Panda is a good one since ranking websites low that are content farms will hopefully deter people from using spam as a tool.

Quality SEO today as a result of Panda will continue to emphasize quality content over trying to fool the search algorithm. Be diligent in your efforts to build and maintain a quality website by creating relevant content consistently.