Gentleman start your engines, we are ready to go! Panda 4.2 has finally arrived, following Gary Illyes’s announcement last month that the refresh is on its way.
“This past weekend we began a Panda update that will rollout over the coming months,” said a Google spokesperson about Panda. “As you know, we’re always working to improve Google so search results are higher quality and more relevant for everyone and this is just one way we do that.”
Google has confirmed that this refresh affects only 2-3% of search queries, which is lower than the previous refresh of 3-5% in September 2014 and the last true update in May 2014 which affected 7.5% of search queries.
We must not forget that affected search queries don’t really mean that those queries all saw the loss of pages in those search results from this new refresh. It also includes pages that have made a return to those search results as well.
This is really a refresh and not an update, the update is still to be awaited
For those who like to dig into all the details of Panda, this update is technically a refresh and not an update. This means it is reapplying the identical signals from the previous Panda for this update as well. This is likely the reason it has only affected 2-3% of the search queries.
If you haven’t made the new changes, now it’s to late
Unfortunately, once Google begins rolling out one of these updates, it is too late to apply any new changes that will have any positive effect during the rolling out phase period. As you may have probably seen previously, these updates have a cut-off date and any changes made after this date will be applied to the next refresh or update, hence the new updates and refreshes that keep coming yearly.
This is a good reason to be continually updating content. But if you have been previously impacted by Panda and did not make the changes to increase quality yet, you will need to wait for the next one.
In the opposite case, if you are now negatively impacted by the Panda algorithm update or refresh, you will need to wait for the next update or refresh.
How long does it going to take?
Well, by analyzing the spokerperson’s statement we can’t really get a good idea about this. What exactly does “coming months” mean anyway? Does it mean two months? Four months? Or is it in limbo right now depending on how fast (or not) they decide to roll it out on any given day or week?
But, no one should really be surprised that they aren’t hitting the entire refresh out at once, even though there are some pretty vocal about the long length of the rollout, this already happened in the past.
Hopefully, this is something we will get further clarification on.
The update will affect high quality small and medium sites, even if this update seems to be rolling out much slower than we usually.
However, the slower update will also make it harder to assess the usual “winners and losers” like we can normally do after the rollouts of these updates.
Ninja Panda
Many SEOs can agree on the fact that no one can really see the evidence of this refresh going live 2 weekends ago. In fact, the fluctuation Mozcast does show happened before the refresh began rolling out, and the temperatures are positively sunny since the roll out started. This is why we are naming it the Ninja Panda.
And this particularly does raise an interesting question if the traditional serp weather reports are unable to pick up on the changes. MozCast certainly haven’t noticed it. Google could easily change from a push Panda update to a slow rolling one, and webmasters wouldn’t necessarily be aware unless they saw an uptick or decline in one of their sites. And that date might not correspond with other similar reports that could technically be months apart but stemming from the same initial push. Google is really sneaky.
Will Panda ever roll into the core algorithm for a continuous update? When we first saw the Quality update, it seemed as a reverse Panda to many experts, since it was rewarding great quality while Panda penalized low quality.
Google could be working on tweaking the core algorithm so that their positive signals will keep surfacing the great content so that lower quality content – even if not actually penalized – will rank much lower and pages deep, so long as there is better quality to rank higher.
Google Panda has been officially rolled out, slow or fast it’s still refreshing. Be sure to send any changes that you may notice on your websites rankings to [email protected]
