Aug 12, 2011 12:40 GMT  ·  By

Google has announced that the 'Panda' search ranking algorithm, designed to cull the search engine of poor quality results, is rolling out to almost all languages supported by Google Search.

The Panda update initially affected only English language searches, but the company is now ready to deploy it for everyone else.

There are still some languages not supported and the effects of the update are smaller than when Google launched the initial update for English results, perhaps partially due to the tweaks that it rolled out since.

"For many months, we’ve been focused on trying to return high-quality sites to users. Earlier this year, we rolled out our 'Panda' change for searches in English around the world," Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of search quality, wrote.

"Today we’re continuing that effort by rolling out our algorithmic search improvements in different languages. Our scientific evaluation data show that this change improves our search quality across the board and the response to Panda from users has been very positive," he announced.

The algorithm update will affect about six to nine percent of all searches, Google says, in terms of noticeable changes. This may vary from language to language.

12 percent of all English queries were affected in some way when the Panda update rolled out initially, but Google later made more changes to the algorithm which, while small, affected the rankings further.

Panda is now running all searches on Google Search for all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Google is still working on getting relevant results for these languages and is still testing the change. Once it's satisfied with the results, it will roll out Panda for these languages as well.

Google rolled out Panda as a response to the growing criticism at the time that content farms and poor quality sites with great SEO managed to swamp the Google Search results for many queries. The company says the update has improved results quality across the board.