Google formally announced via Twitter that there will be no more Panda updates for the remainder of the year. Granted, there’s not that much left of the year.
This might have been nice to know a little bit earlier, but it’s still good to know. The last known Panda update happened nearly a month ago.
Here’s Google’s “weather report” tweet (I’d embed it, but now Twitter’s giving me fail whales):
Search weather report: no major Panda updates until the new year. Context: http://t.co/nDkj74ou
There has been some discussion in WebmasterWorld about the possibility of Google taking a break on Panda for the holidays. Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineRoundtable picked up on this disucssion as well, noting that Google probably doesn’t want a repeat of the whole Florida udpate fiasco, where online retailers kind of got the shaft due to an unexpected algorithm change years ago.
Of course, in more recent years, Google has been pretty open about not wanting to do that to sites, and has recently expressed its goal to be more transparent about algorithm updates in general.
Even if Google had thrown another Panda update at us, I’m not sure it would be comparable to the Florida situation, as that was much more unexpected. Google has semi-regularly been updating the Panda update all year, and savvy webmasters know that this will continue.