What You Need to Know About Panda 4.0

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When Google released its Panda 4.0 algorithm update in May, the company claimed that it was all about improving search results and eliminating “thin” content from top rankings.

Yet some sensibly asked whether the move was all about punishing newswires. Google’s Matt Cuts had fed speculation in the past by tweeting his disapproval of “very spammy queries” and calling press releases “owned content”–and third-party analysis showed significant SEO drops for the biggest wire services in addition to sites like eBay and Ask.com.

Several blogs have since debated what the changes mean for PR–and we asked Gijs Nelissen, co-founder of CRM provider Prezly, for his take.

Why did the newswires’ traffic go down?

Updates to their ranking algorithm changed the way sites are ranked in the Google search results, and rankings of wire services like PRWeb and PRNewswire went down significantly.

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