There is some serious uptick in webmaster and SEO chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums as of this morning in regards to a possible major Panda update. Major enough, we might upgrade the name from 3.9.X to a 4.0 release.
Update: Matt Cutts tweeted that there wasn’t a Panda update but rather an update to the diversity of the search results. He wrote:
Based on the communication, I suspect this is a Panda update and not a Penguin update, despite just having a Panda update, version 3.9.1 on August 20th, almost 4 weeks ago. So I guess we are due our monthly Panda update but still, we are eagerly awaiting the Penguin refresh.
The chatter picked up around 6:30am EDT at the forum. One webmaster said:
We saw a 50% increase in our Google referrals to a heavily panda’d site yesterday. It has been hit by multiple rounds of Panda and overall has lost 90% of its google traffic since Feb 2011. Has anyone else noticed a bump to a Panda’d site on Sept 14?
Another one said:
I did my research before 6:30 am, so didn’t notice the chatter in my earlier coverage.
Mozcast is reporting 88 degrees and turbulence for the day, so they seem to agree. But SERPs.com and SERP Metrics do not share the same findings. Maybe SEOmoz and SERPs.com and SERP Metrics run their tools at different times.
Did your site that was hit by Panda see any changes? Are you for the better or worse? Go check your analytics.
I will try to get confirmation from Google.
Past Panda Refreshes
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 15thPanda 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 WebmasterWorld.
