There we have it! A new Panda Update! 4.0, says Matt.
This puts an end to a lot of speculation going on ever since the start of the month. Barry Schwartz has repeatedly said on Search Engine Roundtable as well as Search Engine Land that Google is tinkering with the algorithm and is doing something significant, which of course they shamelessly denied. Further, Google launched the Payday Loan 2.0 update yesterday.
Last year, around this time, Matt Cutts had announced at the SMX West conference that Panda will be integrated into Google’s overall continuous algorithm changes. This can be taken to mean that the effects of an update or refresh (two different things) will be less severe or noticeable. It is less of a manual effort and happens more in real time as and when Googlebot visits your site. So don’t go running off to your analytics yet to see if you’ve been hit. Hang around for a couple of days and keep looking everywhere.
A couple of months ago, Google even went on to say that it was unlikely that they would confirm any updates. So, Matt’s announcement comes as a pleasant surprise to us!
Panda 4.0 is clearly a major update (changes to site identification and classification processes; worth announcing) to the algorithm as opposed to a data refresh (changes brought about as a result of deeper crawling with more site-specificity).
Here’s the latest from the tracking tools…
Algoroo
MozCast
SERPs Volatility Index
SERPmetrics Flux
And here are some peeps you should watch closely over the next few days – their opinions and insights matter!
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| Barry Schwartz | Dr. Pete Meyers | |
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| Rae Hoffman | Marie Haynes |
This is only the beginning – keep a close eye on the proceedings.
If you’re a webmaster or SEO, do let us know what metrics you’re tracking and what happens to your site eventually… We’d love to hear from you!
And if you’d like an expert opinion to see if you’ve been positively or negatively affected by Panda 4.0, please get in touch soon. We’d be happy to do it for free!
