It’s pretty common for Google’s Matt Cutts to appear in Webmaster Help videos, but they’re usually only a few minutes long. This time, he’s treated webmasters to an hour-long Google+ Hangout (from India), with some other members of Google’s search quality team.
In the video, Cutts responds to a user question, asking if it’s possible to make a one hundred percent recovery from the Panda update.
“And the answer is yes,” says Cutts. “It is possible to recover a hundred percent from Panda….So, it is possible to recover from Panda in the following ways. Remember, Panda is a hundred percent algorithmic. There’s nothing manual involved in that. And we haven’t made any manual exceptions. And the Panda algorithm, we tend to run it every so often. It’s not like it runs every day. It’s one of these things where you might run it once a month or something like that. Typically, you’re gonna refresh the data for it. And at the same time, you might pull in new signals. And those signals might be able to say, ‘Ah, this is a higher-quality site.'”
So, there’s a solid group of engineers that I had the chance to work with who have been looking for signals that differentiate the higher quality sites from the sites that might be slightly lower quality,” he continues. “And if look at–even in the last, say, two or three months–we’ve done a better job about differentiating all those. And so, when we rerun the pipeline to recompute the data and then we push that back out–I think the most recent one was earlier this month–there was one that was probably about two weeks ago.”
Google pushed two Panda refreshes in June. More on that here.
“And so, when that happens, if, according to our signals, it looks like the site is high-quality or there’s new data or there’s new signals, then you just wouldn’t, you would pop out of being affected and you wouldn’t have to worry about it at all,” Cutts says. “So, in order to recover from Panda, take a fresh look and basically ask yourself, ‘How compelling is my site?’ We’re looking for high quality. We’re looking for something where you land on it, you’re really happy, the sort of thing where you wanna tell your friends about it and come back to it, bookmark it. It’s just incredibly useful. That’s the sort of thing that we don’t want to get affected. So, yes. It is possible to recover.”