Google is rolling out its latest Panda refresh after nearly a year’s worth of waiting.
Unlike previous Panda updates and refreshes, this latest named refresh is being implemented very slowly. In fact, it’s rolling out so slowly that many publishers might not even notice that it’s happening.
In practical terms, this means that some site pages might see the impact of what SearchEngineLand is calling Panda 4.2 much sooner than other pages on the same site.
This is the first time Google has updated Panda since September of 2014. (Though there have been minor algorithmic fluctuations multiple times since then.) And, according to SEO media guru Barry Schwartz, this is the 28th Panda update since its introduction in 2011.
It’s believed that Panda 4.2 could impact as many as 2%-3% of all English language queries. That’s slightly higher than most Panda updates, which normally only impact about 1%-%. By way of comparison, the original Panda update impacted around 11%-12% of all English language queries.
The rollout is especially good news for publishers who had been penalized by the last Panda update, made corrections, but were still being punished.
While Google has said in the past that they were going to move to a state of continuous updates, this seems to be the clearest example of that phenomenon we’ve seen to date.
It’s also worth noting that the announcement of Panda 4.2, once again, flies in the face of Google’s stated policy of neither announcing nor naming algorithmic updates.