One of the bigger pieces of news — certainly for webmasters and SEOs — from our SMX Advanced conference this week is that Google will soon be releasing version 2.2 of the Panda algorithm update.

Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that during Tuesday’s keynote question-and-answer session with Danny Sullivan. Cutts said that the update has been approved, hasn’t been rolled out yet, but that should happen soon.

Improved Scraper Detection

The next update will target a common webmaster complaint related to the original Panda/Farmer update: sites that scrape and re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content.

“A change has been approved that should help with that issue,” Cutts said.

He also reiterated some previous Panda-related information:

• Google will continue to tweak and update the Panda algorithm.
• There’s no exact date yet for when Panda will launch fully beyond English-language searches.

Recovering From Panda

Cutts also said there have been no manual exceptions made to sites that were wrongly affected, but there have been recompilations of data that may have helped some sites.

In particular, he noted that the Panda algorithm is run against Google’s entire index of pages on an infrequent basis, in order to tag certain sites that should be dinged by it, as opposed to some of its automatic spam detection tools.

For example, Google’s constantly scanning for pages that might use hidden text. If it spots them, then it may assess a penalty.

Google is not constantly scanning for pages that might get hit by its Panda penalty. Instead, Google manually runs that algorithm, which then determines web sites that should be hit by it.

This also means that making changes to a site hit by Panda won’t produce any immediate change in Google. Instead, such changes — if they are beneficial — wouldn’t get registered by Google until the next Panda assessment.

When is Panda run? Google didn’t say. But it seems to be something that runs every few weeks and in association with when the algorithm is improved (Panda 1.0, Panda 2.0, Panda 2.1, Panda 2.2, etc.)