Yesterday we broke the news that there was an other update that overlapped the EMD update that we had on friday targeting exact match domains.
I wasn’t sure what that update was, so I emailed our friends at Google and Matt Cutts responded that it was a Panda update that began to roll out on Thursday and has been continuing to roll out even today and will likely finish rolling out through the weekend.
This is not a basic data refresh to the Panda algorithm, it is an update to the algorithm itself. Meaning, new sites and old sites are more likely to be impacted even without making any changes. In fact, Matt said 2.4% of English queries were impacted and 0.5% of non-English queries were impacted.
Here is the quote:
Panda Overlaps EMD Update
Now, this is overlapping the EMD update! So it would be hard for some EMDs to know if the EMD update hurt them or if it was a Panda update that hurt them. I hate when Google does this but they likely had good reason to do so. Matt Cutts is not dumb, he understands the webmaster – despite what most of you think – and he made a conscious decision to let a major Panda update overlap the EMD update.
Panda #20: Why Not Panda 4.0
Why are we moving away from version numbers for the Panda update? Technically, I would have named it Panda 4.0, but Danny Sullivan decided he rather just number them based on how many updates there have been. So we had 20 Panda updates and only 2 Penguin updates (at least on the record).
Past Google Panda Update:
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 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, Google+ and Google Webmaster Help.
