According to a Google spokesperson “We’ll continue to iterate on returning high-quality sites to Google users as part of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year. We have nothing more specific to announce at this time.”

Google’s Panda updates have already shook the online industry and thousands of websites are affected due to this. Just a couple weeks ago, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about a new iteration of Google’s Panda update, which he said was already approved and would be hitting soon. The update has been commonly referred to throughout the search industry as “Panda 2.2″.

Dealing with the issue of plagiarism, this version is expected to address the issue of scraped content more specifically. This is an issue that continues to plague the web and Google’s search results even post-Panda as the scraped content often ranks higher than the original. Cutts is quoted as saying, “A guy on my team is working on that issue. A change has been approved that should help with that issue. We’re continuing to iterate on Panda. The algorithm change originated in search quality, not the web spam team.”

Though Google has not made any announcements or references indicating that the update has gone live yet, but webmasters are thinking it might have been released. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread, where there is a mix of webmasters claiming they have suffered from the alleged update and some that have recovered. One said, “I’ve recovered as of 36 hours ago. Day1 of recovery, traffic doubled, adsense tripled Day2 of recovered, 4 hours in, traffic has doubled again, back to my best levels of 18 months ago.”

Cutts said he didn’t know when Panda would be launched internationally that is to say in other languages, and that Google has made no manual exceptions with the update, meaning all sites have been affected solely by algorithmic tweaks – none by hand. ”

It is quite interesting that Google makes algorithmic adjustments every day, and sometimes even more than once a day. Surprisingly not all updates get the attention the Panda update has received, but you never know when some adjustment can impact your site’s rankings for better or for worse.

Cutts recently said, “If we think you’re relatively high quality, Panda will have a smaller impact. If you’re expert enough and no one else has the good content, even if you’ve been hit by Panda that page can still rank.”

So the good news is that you can still rank higher even if you are impacted by Panda update. So in your quest for quality, even if you lose a great deal of Google’s favor, you still have hope of getting back into its good books if the quality is there.

As Dani Horowtiz of DaniWeb discussed recently, there are a lot of adjustments you can make to your website (not all of which are directly content related) that can help you regain search referrals. Google has over 200 signals, and even if you have a lot of trouble gaining ground on one of them, there are a lot more areas where you may be able to improve.