Google announced a new Panda update being progressively rolled out during the week, affecting results for about 3-5% of queries. The announcement was made by Pierre Far on Google+.

The latest update, referred to as Panda 4.1 by sites like SearchEngineLand, comes about 4 months after the last Panda update that was rolled out around May 22.

According to the announcement by Pierre Far, this update will use some new signals gathered from user and webmaster feedback that may help small and medium sized websites rank higher.

The last Panda update had affected search engine visibility of several large websites including eBay. Thus far, reports of websites affected have been relatively few following this update. SearchMetrics, however, published its list of winners and losers from the latest Panda update. Prominent among the losers is Office365.com. The SearchMetrics concludes that news, content and download sites have benefited from this Panda update while some game sites and medical portals have lost search visibility.

The latest Panda update comes in the same week that there have been reports of Google clamping down on some private blog networks.