Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorithm every year. Some days it makes more than one (obviously). One day last week, the search engine reportedly made a small tweak to the Panda part.
Barry Schwartz posted the following statement from Google regarding the matter:
“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.
So, take that for what you will.
Google has not given any new indications of what it is doing differently on the Panda front, but as the company has said in the past, they will continue to “iterate” on it.
A few webmasters recently took to the forums to express that their sites had suddenly changed rankings, and interestingly quite a few seemed to be for the better. That’s kind of a change of pace from the grumbles we’ve been hearing for the better part of the year.
We still haven’t heard of any full recoveries, though HubPages is taking an interesting approach, as we looked at recently, by giving authors their own subdomains, as to separate content author by author, so one author who writes poorly doesn’t drag down the content of a higher quality author.
In early tests, HubPages has seen some success in rankings for certain content employing this strategy. The jury is still out on how this will impact the site as a whole.
Update: Dani Horowitz tells us that Daniweb, which we discussed at length in an interview with her, has made a full recovery (see comments below). More on DaniWeb’s recovery here.