Google has released a new Webmaster Help video about the Panda update. Matt Cutts responds to a user-submitted question asking how she will know whether her site is hit by Panda since Google has integrated it into its normal indexing process, and if her site was already hit, how will she know if she has recovered?

Cutts begins, “I think it’s a fair question because if the site as already hit, how will she know if she has recovered from Panda? So, Panda is a change that we rolled out, at this point, a couple years ago targeted towards lower quality content. It used to be that roughly every month or so we would have a new update, where you’d say, okay there’s something new – there’s a launch. We’ve got new data. Let’s refresh the data. It had gotten to the point, where Panda – the changes were getting smaller, they were more incremental, we had pretty good signals, we had pretty much gotten the low-hanging winds, so there weren’t a lot of really big changes going on with the latest Panda changes. And we said lets go ahead and rather than have it be a discreet data push that is something that happens every month or so at its own time, and we refresh the data, let’s just go ahead and integrate it into indexing.”

“So at this point, we think that Panda is affecting a small enough number of webmasters on the edge that we said, ‘Let’s go ahead and integrate it into our main process for indexing,'” he continues. “We did put out a blog post, which I would recommend, penned by Amit Singhal, that talks about the sorts of signals that we look at whenever we’re trying to assess quality within Panda, and I think we’ve done some videos about that in the past, so I won’t rehash it, but basically we’re looking for high-quality content. And so if you think you might be affected by Panda, the overriding kind of goal is to try to make sure that you have high-quality content – the sort of content that people really enjoy, that’s compelling – the sort of thing that they’ll love to read that you might see in a magazine or in a book, and that people would refer back to or send friends to – those sorts of things.”

You can read more about that Singhal blog post here.

“That would be the overriding goal, and since Panda is now integrated with indexing, that remains the goal of entire indexing system,” says Cutts. “So, if your’e not ranking as highly as you were in the past, overall, it’s always a good idea to think about, ‘Okay, can I look at the quality of the content on my site? Is there stuff that’s derivative or scraped or duplicate or just not as useful, or can I come up with something original that people will really enjoy, and those kinds of things tend to be a little more likely to rank higher in our rankings.”

See all of our past Panda coverage here to learn more.

Image: Google (YouTube)