Last night, at 7pm EDT, Google announced they pushed out a refresh for the Google Panda algorithm.
We had some rumors of a Panda refresh a couple weeks ago but Google said there was no such update. Truth is, looking at the forums, even as of this morning, there are very few complaints despite what I would normally see during a Panda refresh.
New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. More context: goo.gl/huekf
— A Googler (@google) July 24, 2012
This time, Google said this Panda refresh impacted about 1% of the search results, which is actually pretty significant. Not as significant as 11.8% when Google first launched Panda in February 2011 or as significant as Google launching Panda in Koera and Japan with 5% but still, for a refresh, it seems significant.
So this surprises me that I don't see more complaints in the forums.
That being said, the previous Panda refresh was Panda 3.8 and about 30 days before this update. SEOs are patiently awaiting a Penguin refresh, the last and first refresh we had was on May 25th, so we are due an update there.
One last concern for me is that we are out of numbers. 3.9 and now what? :)
Here are the past Google Panda updates:
- Panda 3.9 on July 24th
- Panda 3.8 on June 25th
- Panda 3.7 on June 9th
- Panda 3.6 on April 27th
- Panda 3.5 on April 19th
- Panda 3.4 on March 23rd
- Panda 3.3 on about February 26th
- Panda 3.2 on about January 15th
- Panda 3.1 on November 18th
- Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th
- Panda 2.5.2 on October 13th
- Panda 2.5.1 on October 9th
- Panda 2.5 on September 28th
- Panda 2.4 in August
- Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd.
- Panda 2.2 on June 18th or so.
- Panda 2.1 on May 9th or so.
- Panda 2.0 on April 11th or so.
- Panda 1.0 on February 24th
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.