Over the past few days, even as far back as last Friday, I noticed a lot of chatter on a possible Google update.
So yesterday, after returning from my family vacation, I emailed Google to confirm that an update was indeed happening. Shortly after receiving my email, they replied that they just confirmed it via Twitter.
Google said they rolled out a minor Panda refresh this past Monday on August 20th. This refresh only impacted less than 1% of search queries according to Google.
Panda data refresh this past Monday. ~1% of queries noticeably affected. More context: goo.gl/wQRZ0
— A Googler (@google) August 22, 2012
The previous Panda refresh was a month prior on July 24th.
I did receive emails from a few people who asked me to verify that this was a Panda refresh. Because they saw changes on their Panda penalized (pandalized) sites and wanted to know if they finally broke out of that penalty. Here is a screen shot from one site that recovered with this update:
Here are the past Panda refreshes and updates:
- Panda 3.9.1 on August 20th
- 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
Yes, I am running out of digits. I guess I can always go to 3.9.9.1.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, Google+ and WebmasterWorld.