Google Panda demotes or adjusts your rankings down — it does not devalue

In part two of our interview with Gary Illyes of Google, Gary told us that the Google Panda algorithm demotes, or adjusts a site’s ranking down; it does not devalue or ignore the spam, like Penguin 4.0 does.

Gary told us in the interview, when we asked about Panda devaluing versus demoting, “[S]o essentially, if you want a blunt answer, it will not devalue, it will actually demote.”

As you may remember, Penguin 4.0 now devalues links by ignoring them, as opposed to demoting or penalizing the links. But that is not how Panda works. Gary said “… it is an adjustment. Basically, we figured that site is trying to game our systems, and unfortunately, successfully. So we will adjust the rank. We will push the site back just to make sure that it’s not working anymore.”

Here is the audio snippet:

https://soundcloud.com/marketingland/marketing-land-live-highlight-gary-illyes-talks-about-the-panda-algorithm

Here is the transcript:

Barry Schwartz: Well, since you brought up Panda, and I know I asked you this on Twitter, you didn’t give us a direct answer to it. … I asked specifically, does Panda devalue or demote or both. And you kind of implied it demotes. But can you like tell us straight up?

Gary Illyes: Well, Panda is not a penalty. … Yeah, maybe in the beginning it was thought of as a penalty, but currently we don’t.

…

But we don’t think of Panda as a penalty now, but rather as an algorithm applied to sites … or sites as a whole.

It measures the quality of a site pretty much by looking at the vast majority of the pages at least. But essentially allows us to take quality of the whole site into account when ranking pages from that particular site and adjust the ranking accordingly for the pages.

So essentially, if you want a blunt answer, it will not devalue, it will actually demote.

Barry Schwartz: OK, but it won’t promote it?

Gary Illyes: No, I don’t think that [it] has the ability to promote.

Barry Schwartz: And it’s looking at specific pages on the site, gathering all the pages across the side and saying based on all of these pages that we looked at for this site, 80 percent of them are pretty poor quality, thus we might go ahead and apply a Panda demotion of some sorts.

Gary Illyes: Well, it is an adjustment. Basically, we figured that site is trying to game our systems, and unfortunately, successfully. So we will adjust the rank. We will push the site back just to make sure that it’s not working anymore.