Google
stating they would no longer corroborate any of the rolling Panda updates, they
seem to have gone back on that and confirmed that yes a new Panda began going
live on July 18. However, unlike many of the previous Panda updates, many
webmasters have notice that it does not have as wide of an impact as previous
updates.
Matt Cutts has previously stated
that Panda updates would rollout over course of 10 days each month, to soften
the impact that it has on webmasters when the change happens at once. However,
this does make a lot more difficult for webmasters to sometimes determine what a
normal fluctuation is and what actually a new Panda rollout is.
For those
who actively monitor search key phrases, there is definitely been a lot of
fluctuation even on an hourly basis. Some sites will rank for a specific
keyword phrase, vanishing hour later, and the return sometimes in relatively
the same position other times completely different result pages even.
A lot of
people in their Google Webmaster Tools data have noticed that they are getting
some definite increase in the number of impressions that they are displaying,
but the traffic has remained stable. This is raising the question if Google
Webmaster Tools is somehow measuring impressions differently or if there is
something else that would account for such an increase in impressions while the
click throughs are static.
Something
that is noticeable is that a lot of informational sites, both large ones and
small ones are being heavily impacted with this new rollout. This includes the
big names of the informational sites, such as Wikipedia, and about.com where
there are definite changes happening in their rankings.
Google has
previously stated that they want to give authority sites a bit more prominence
in the search results. Of course, that also means that they need to update their
signals in the search algorithm on how Google is determining what is authority
versus what are simply spam sites mimicking the authority. This update seems to
be targeting authoritative sites – and more specifically what should be
considered an authority website and what shouldn’t be.
There has
also been a bit of chatter that sites that have fared better in this update are
active in using Google+. Some sites that saw a decline in rankings have seen
them restored or increased in this new rollout when Google+ activity for the
site has been done. While this does make people a bit wary that Google is
rewarding sites that are on Google+, it has been no secret that it is one of
the signals that many believe have has impact on the ranking algorithm.
There is also
speculation that some sites that have gotten caught in a previous Panda update,
where they have received warnings for unnatural linking, that some of those
impacted sites are now ranking again. The member CaptainSalad2 on
WebmasterWorld stated a site began ranking again after removing the disavow
links that was submitted the same day the tool was originally released last
year, which was also the only change made to that site.
While this latest the Google panda
update seems to be of a much softer impact than we have seen from previous
updates, it is also worth noting that these rollouts generally occur over 10
days and we are only two days into that. So we definitely could see more
fluctuations in search results over the next 10 days while Google watches to
see how this new update is impacting the search results, particularly spam and
authority sites, and then continue to rollout the update and also tweak the
algorithm accordingly.
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