Google Panda 4.2 Rolling Out

[netmeg]

According to Searchengineland:

Google has pushed out a Google Panda refresh this weekend, many of you may not have noticed, but this roll out is happening incredibly slowly. Google said the update can take months to fully roll out because it will slowly roll out through your site. The Panda algorithm is still indeed a site-wide algorithm but some of your web pages might not see a change immediately.

Emphasis by me, because WTF.

A Google spokesperson confirmed with us the update did being rolling out this past weekend. They also noted it can take months to fully roll out. Google did not share with us how large of an impact this was on their search results, but they did imply it was a fairly small impact.

I haven't seen any signs of it in any client sites yet, but maybe it'll be "months"

[searchengineland.com...]

[aok88]

I noindexed 7k pages out of 11k, and it made our traffic drop a little. I too was suspicious that having that large a percentage of noindexed pages could be a really bad signal to send panda. So I 301d every one of them instead. That seemed to cause traffic to plummet and now it's getting a third of the traffic it was getting a month ago. Not sure if it was the 301-ing or something on Google's end. Frustrating as hell.

[aok88]

But all of a sudden, traffic is steadily increasing over the last few days.

[Nutterum]

That is normal aok88. With such big shift in authority with your website, it is common for you to have a period of slow traffic. When we redesigned our corporate website, we kept the page structure the same, but made some 301 redirects where that made sense, the consequence was a full 2 week period with a fraction of the organic traffic comming in.

[aok88]

Thanks Nutterum

[LostOne]

Well, what's it been? Six months?

Exciting to watch huh? Maybe they never got the thing started. Sounds logical. Slow roll-out, meaning "when we think we have it right we'll let it go" instead of a more defined period of when it would occur.

[Itanium]

I think they integrated Panda into the main algo last year in july and started to update the index bit by bit.

[petehall]

* Tumbleweed *

G is dead.

[Nutterum]

Not dead. Just not a search engine per say. More like personalized information provider. I hope you can see the vast difference in the two.

[RedBar]

Hahaha ... Excellent PIP > Personalised Information Provider :-)

Specially made for all those people who haven't a clue how to stop Google/Facebook et al following them around!

[Nutterum]

Hearing the latest talk with Gary Illyes my suspicion (partly picked up by seoroundtable.com at some point) was confirmed. Penguin and Panda "live" parts move at the speed of recrawl.

Enjoy your wait.

[JS_Harris]

When Google began switching from a company that purely ranks to one that IS the content provider they went from trying to have lightning fast and frequent updates to one that has gotten incredibly slow with grandfathered results in the top few spots. At some point Google went from pure rankings to an archive/ranking hybrid. Sure they rank, but now they provide "answers" too, perhaps in anticipation of people talking to their device instead of searching online?

I think updates now have the sole goal of filtering out new forms of spam that reach page one. Finding new sites has become trivial and Google updates the top few spots much, much, much more slowly. I think they got caffeinated and now are taking a nap on rankings to focus solely on spam.

[RedBar]

I think they got caffeinated and now are taking a nap on rankings to focus solely on spam.

That's a very good point, without a doubt it is much slower to get new pages to rank these days no matter how unique they are.

[EditorialGuy]

Finding new sites has become trivial and Google updates the top few spots much, much, much more slowly.

When you consider that most of the pages in the top spots belong to sites that have (among other things) established link profiles, a wealth of user data that's known to Google, etc., it makes sense that the top-ranked search results wouldn't change dramatically from day to day, week to week, or month to month.

To put it another way, it never hurts to have a head start--whether you're running toward the gold egg in the Easter-egg hunt or chasing the no. 1 ranking for "fuzzy widgets."

[aristotle]

grandfathered results in the top few spots

This appears to be true even when a site may be malicious. Yesterday I did a google search in which the no. 3 ranking entry showed the warning message "This site may harm your computer."

If google thinks a site could be malicious, why do they give it such a high ranking in their results?

[EditorialGuy]

If google thinks a site could be malicious, why do they give it such a high ranking in their results?

That's easy: Different algorithms.

[Whitey]

There is no need of urgency from Google's perspective to update Penguin and Panda. They have what they want, so it's not been a priority for "x" years to re run the algo's.

In my mind, it's just a white-list of locally and internationally recognized brands.

Especially in monetized SERP's. If you combine the first page's "Google Assets" comprising Google's content layer, where they try to engage users through a deeper engagement of their content , there really isn't a lot to be competing for in organic for most monetized verticals. In the vertical i watch, over 50% of engagement is on mobile, and Google would be focused on how it monetizes that.

Best to switch focus to the users and find ways to capture their attention in different ways. You may see a lift in the SERP's as a consequence of that success.

[JS_Harris]

I heard rumors in the form of a Twitter post from someone at Google that we might be seeing a Penduin update in the next few weeks, and that was a few weeks ago. Has there been a Penguin update yet? If not, think it's too late to get a site fixed up in time?

It literally ASTOUNDS me at the number of sites I see that lost major traffic back in 2011 and NEVER regained it, their charts look so obvious in that they have been flatlined since but the webmasters plug along anyway. If one of them started today and completed all of the required improvements this week, and Penguin rolls out next week, do you think they'll use data this fresh to roll it out with?

[mrengine]

It literally ASTOUNDS me at the number of sites I see that lost major traffic back in 2011 and NEVER regained it, their charts look so obvious in that they have been flatlined since but the webmasters plug along anyway. If one of them started today and completed all of the required improvements this week, and Penguin rolls out next week, do you think they'll use data this fresh to roll it out with?

I highly doubt that if someone completed all the improvements to their site this week they would see any improvement when the next rollout occurs. I'm of the belief that many of those webmasters who lost traffic in 2011 already made the needed improvements years ago, most probably in 2012, and still have not seen any improvements 3+ years later. It would seem that Google does not want them to have traffic, maybe never. There seems to be an inconsistent application of algorithmic penalties as to how they are applied to small, medium and large businesses. On the surface this may seem to be an injustice, but I believe that Google tests their algorithm changes against the big and popular sites, which leaves many smaller sites behind in the search results.

[rustybrick]

Happy Anniversary Panda!

[Nutterum]

Hear, hear.