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Originally released in February 2011, Google Panda is an on-going upgrade of Google’s search results ranking algorithm. The purpose of Panda is to put higher-quality sites near the top of organic search results while pushing low-quality sites further down the list.

Panda does this by acting as a filter to eliminate search results that are not useful to users such as those created only to attract traffic in order to get impressions and display advertising. Low-quality websites are also referred to as “thin,” which often means there are a lot of ads yet relatively little quality content.

So what exactly does high quality mean to Google? In a word: content. You must have relevant, unique, and valuable content on your site or you will be penalized with lower search rankings. But since quality is a subjective term, below are some specific things to remember when creating content. Read our previous post to learn more about Google Panda 4.2.

Google Panda 4.2, which is actually the 30^th Panda refresh overall, was rolled out on July 18, 2015. But it’s a slow rollout that is expected to take several months to complete. This blog post is designed to help you understand what the latest update means, and offer tips on improving your website ranking and overall user experience.

Google recently threw down the mobile gauntlet. On April 21, 2015, changes went into effect that raise the importance of the mobile friendly website.

The changes greatly expand Google’s use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, which impacts mobile organic search. So make sure you’re ready!

Simply put, these changes are huge. To put it in perspective, Zineb Ait Bahajji of Google’s Webmaster Trends team said at SMX Munich that the changes would be more significant than their Google Panda and Google Penguin updates. Need we say more? You can read the official Google announcement here.

Google recently released an article stating that HTTPS would be used as a ranking signal in search. As of right now, Google claims that this ranking signal will be quite small with less than 1% of global queries. In general, Google is pushing for the web to conform to HTTPS only traffic — that is, all communication should be secure by default. Here is their entire seminar on this topic.

Optimizing for mobile search is more important than ever. Set yourself up for search success by getting into a mobile mentality when marketing your business. Considering the title tag is still one of the most influential on-page SEO signals, one of the first steps toward mobile SEO should be to optimize your titles for the mobile screen.