Last night at SMX West, Google's Matt Cutts announced that the Panda algorithm will be more of a rolling update, as opposed to what it has been as a manually pushed out update.
I am not sure what I am going to do with my time now. I am no longer going to be able to get confirmations from Google about Panda updates. The updates are going to be less transparent to webmasters and SEOs. They will likely happen more frequently and have less of an impact on the overall search results. At least that is my take.
I posted the audio file of Matt saying this at Search Engine Land:
Rather than having some huge change that happens on a given day. You are more likely in the future to see Panda deployed gradually as we rebuild the index. So you are less likely to see these large scale sorts of changes.
So the update that is rolling out over the weekend might not be that noticeable to you and I.
I should note, we asked in the past if Panda was a rolling update and it wasn't. So it looks like now it is.
Here are the past Panda updates:
- Panda #24 on January 22, 2013
- Panda #23 on December 21, 2012
- Panda #22 on November 21st
- Panda #22 on November 21st
- Panda #21 on November 5th
- Panda #20 on September 27th
- Panda 3.9.2 on September 18th
- 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
Forum discussion at Google+.