Can someone elaborate on the effects of Panda 4.0? How to protect a site from the bad effects of Panda 4.0? Is there is good effect of it?

The main reason for the panda update 4.0 is that it does not allow low quality content websites to have a good ranking in the search engine.Its really an advantage since it allows only the high quality content website to earn their rankings instead of the low quality content websites.

On May 19, Google began rolling out its latest version of the Panda
site quality algorithm. Originally released in 2011, and sometimes
referred to as the Farmer Update, Panda 1.0 targeted content farms and
other thin content sites. Since then, 27 Panda updates have been made,
mostly in the form of monthly data refreshes.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s head of web spam, this version of
the Panda algorithm will change the search results for approximately
seven and a half percent of all search queries. That’s the largest
Panda-related change in Google’s search results since 2011.

Panda’s updates can take up to 10 days to roll out completely, so
we’ll likely see further fluctuations in search results and organic
search performance for the next week or so.

 

 

I think to summarise if your site has strong site wide keywords and good content (e.g. not a load of 0 results pages etc) then you'll be fine. Where an update like Panda can help is by your serp rivals taking a kicking leaving the next few spaces available for your site to move up.

 

I think a SEO is a double edged sword, sometimes gains are through your hard work and other gains are through rivals doing something stupid.

I'm with BB here. Panda is a nightmare for those with huge websites, and can see massive issues caused because the initial foundations weren't set. This is a softer change, and a lot of authority websites have seen rapid gains in exposure and traffic. Not through their hard work but because Google has become a little bit smarter.

 

On the flip side, a website I'm just getting stuck into is a recruitment website. A page for every town and city, as well as a page for every job title in every town and city. This has seen 50,000 duplicated pages. We're not talk content, but because Rel canonical hasn't been set up and rel next/prev isn't in place, each page is then duplicated 4/5 times.

 

It has been hit with a panda drop.

 

So the pros are it's softer, the cons are it's easy to be undone by it. Common sense and a bit of SEO knowledge can get someone out of the mess.

Low Quality Content with keyword stuffing

On the flip side, a website I'm just getting stuck into is a recruitment website. A page for every town and city, as well as a page for every job title in every town and city. This has seen 50,000 duplicated pages. We're not talk content, but because Rel canonical hasn't been set up and rel next/prev isn't in place, each page is then duplicated 4/5 times.

 

Hell yeah, I've had this problem before with escaping breadcrumbs and query strings. Set up a 301/404 system a few months back and it's gone from 900k pages to 432k ish ... serps are rising though from the effort.

Panda 4.0 has just hitted ebay to the extent of 80% and lowered it's site ranking ,because ebay has a thin content , over optimized hyperlinks and thin content which is content rich doorways