Over the past few days, even as far back as last Friday, I noticed a lot of chatter on a possible Google update.

So yesterday, after returning from my family vacation, I emailed Google to confirm that an update was indeed happening. Shortly after receiving my email, they replied that they just confirmed it via Twitter.

Google said they rolled out a minor Panda refresh this past Monday on August 20th. This refresh only impacted less than 1% of search queries according to Google.

The previous Panda refresh was a month prior on July 24th.

I did receive emails from a few people who asked me to verify that this was a Panda refresh. Because they saw changes on their Panda penalized (pandalized) sites and wanted to know if they finally broke out of that penalty. Here is a screen shot from one site that recovered with this update:

Here are the past Panda refreshes and updates:

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

Yes, I am running out of digits. I guess I can always go to 3.9.9.1.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, Google+ and WebmasterWorld.