Happy birthday Google Panda! We are exactly one year after Google unleashed its biggest-affect search algorithm (at least since “Florida” in 2003) and it seems it was just yesterday (maybe eternity for others)…

To celebrate (mourn for others) this occasion, I decided to make a quick overview of where we are standing right now with this algorithm and bring you a nice infographic I found that can pretty much summarize the Panda timeline, its main characteristics and effect.

Today we are slightly over one month since the last confirmed Panda update in January, which surprisingly was pretty minor and almost unnoticeable (relatively of course) after a big gap from the prior update in November 2011 (about two months gap).

The fact that after the biggest gap since the initial roll out the effect was so small, many started believing that Google is in fact dividing the Panda to different algorithms so it would be more correlated with the general search algorithm.

This assumption got some reinforcement after Google stated in their January search coverage that they have made it “more integrated into our pipelines”. Either that or either that Google search team is planning for us some great big algorithmic update soon.

As for sites affected by the Panda, there were some stories of sites that managed to restore their traffic and rankings after being Pandalized, so it seems that recovery is possible but difficult (you can follow the recovery strategies from the infographic).

This is about where we stand today and note that a new Panda “data refresh” suppose to appear at some time in the next couple of weeks. Enjoy the infographic (courtesy of SEOBook):