Google has said before that its most recent Panda refresh would roll out slowly, taking months instead of day. It is a global refresh.
It has also said that it is going so slowly because of technical issues rather than trying to confuse webmasters and SEOs.
Search Engine Land is sharing some new details about the latest Panda after speaking with unnamed sources at Google.
For one, Google reportedly said it’s shifting its infrastructure towards “more continuous changing and gradual rolling out of Panda, incorporated into their core ranking algorithms.”
They still have work to do, but that’s the goal. This is pretty much along the lines of stuff we’ve heard before, but this is an update illustrating that it may still be a while before this is really the case.
They also told SEL that Panda may hit different pages on a site at different times and in different ways despite it being a side-wide action. Some pages could be hurt more than others. Ultimately, you won’t know if you’re being affected by it for sure until the whole, slow roll-out completes. We’re assuming Google will indicate to webmasters when it is actually done. I’m sure people will hound them about it until they spill the beans either way.
Finally, the company indicated to SEL that the same Panda advice they gave back in 2011 still applies today. That would essentially be a list of 23 questions to ask yourself about the quality of your site.
None of what Google is saying is likely to make webmasters feel much better about their situation if they’ve already been impacted by the refresh or if they’re trying to recover from the previous one and not seeing results so far. That said, there have been reports of signs of recovery.
Given that the roll-out is so slow, we don’t really know what types of sites are suffering the most and getting the most benefit out of the refresh. That will have to be evaluated after it completes.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
