Panda inspired changes reveal slower index update times?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In preparation for the next Panda update, after losing some traffic during the Feb update, I improved a lot of less important pages on my site and removed several that had affiliate offers on them.

That was several weeks ago and though the removed pages disappeared from search right away the number of indexed pages is still being reported as including the pages on Google.com. Likewise they all still appear in GWT.

In fact I can't find a single Google service that accurately reflects changes made 3 weeks ago. In GWT for example, if I research my site for 3 DAYS ago all the pages removed 3 WEEKS ago are still there. The internal links page is all wrong too. etc.

Is Panda the cause? Do your site metrics no longer update until Panda does?

[BillyS]

I think I have a pretty good test case for this, because I've seen this pattern for about two months now.

GWT reported we have about 1,200 short meta descriptions. Each week, we write about 100 meta descriptions. GWT updates about twice a week, each time lowering the value by about 50 items (100 per week). BUT there is about a three week lag (We have entered about 300 more descriptions than GWT states).

I also saw this with the Thumbnail for our site. We were making some early morning changes to our site template and we accidently forgot to change a reference to an image location. The problem was live for less than two minutes before it was fixed. Sure enough, the Thumbnail shows the site without the image. It's been like that for at least 10 days now.

I don't think it's Panda related, but it's probably a function of both how often Google thinks information is updated on a site as well as a factor like PR.

BTW - we're overdue for a Panda update, maybe later this week. Seems like it typically happens on a Thursday evening.