Last week, SearchMetrics posted lists of what it found to be the top winners and losers from Google’s recent Panda update iteration (commonly referred to as Panda 2.5). Now, the firm has released new SEO Visibility data indicating that large portions of the update appear to have rolled back.

“This data shows a large-scale recovery,” says SearchMetrics founder Marcus Tober. “Out of 30 domains featured in last week’s list, 10 could recover 80-90% of their visibility, with another 10 even surpassing their pre-panda 2.5 reach!”

This is in line with a report from DaniWeb that it had quickly recovered after being hit by the Panda update for the second time. A tweet from Google’s Matt Cutts said:

@mattcutts
Matt CuttsWeather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%). 6 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

And a Google spokesperson told WebProNews, “We pushed a fresh version of data that incorporated more of the signals that we’ve incorporated after the initial launch of Panda.”

“Previous updates seemed to be high-confidence decisions – Google generally would not alter the Panda classifications for a couple of weeks,” says Tober. “Panda 2.5 seems to be an exception to that rule – this weeks’ SEO Visibility data shows that large portions of the 2.5 update seem to be rolled back!”

He provides the following list comparing/contrasting the data for key sites:

The largest winners in the rollback, as Tober notes, appear to be nowpublic.com (+122%), killerstartups (+114%), motortrend (+108%), and thehollywoodgossip.com (+105%). Recovery was only denied to bettermedicine.com (0%), faqs.org (-3%), ohinternet.com (-3%) and thenextweb.com (-13%), he adds.

This is very interesting considering that TheNextWeb seems like a reasonably quality site to me – that and the fact that their editor-in-chief told us they hadn’t noticed any effect following the launch of 2.5.