Google Panda was first released around a year ago in February 2011 and is Google’s attempt to increase the ranking of “good quality” websites and downgrade sites that contain large amounts of advertising or are specifically designed to rank for specific search terms.
Panda is named after Navneet Panda, an engineer who came up with a way of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine the quality of a website. In order to do this a group of volunteers tested and rated thousands of websites for usability and quality. They rated sites on design, trustworthiness, speed and how useful they found the site. The results were then used to determine the criteria of high quality and low quality sites and incorporate this into the algorithm that Google uses to rank sites.
The good news is that in theory this should make sites that contain relevant and interesting content rank more highly than sites employing expensive “SEO Gurus” to dupe search engines with tricks and short cuts. A long term strategy of creating good content that gets shared and read should pay off.