As previously reported, Google’s Matt Cutts revealed at SMX this week that Google would be pushing a refresh to its famous (or perhaps infamous) Panda update on either Friday or Monday. Friday has arrived, and it appears that the refresh has arrived with it.
Barry Schwartz is pointing to some forum chatter about webmasters already seeing the effects of the refresh, indicating that it has likely begun to roll out. As others have pointed out, it’s not uncommon for Google to do this on a Friday. Schwartz says signs point to the roll out starting on Thursday afternoon and into today.
This isn’t just your typical run of the mill Panda refresh, however. This could very well be the last time Google manually pushes one, and has an announcement for it. Panda is becoming more of a “rolling” update. Schwartz quotes Cutts from SMX:
Rather than having some huge change that happens on a given day. You are more likely in the future to see Panda deployed gradually as we rebuild the index. So you are less likely to see these large scale sorts of changes.
It remains to be seen just what kind of an impact this will truly have on sites, but it’s not likely to make things much easier.
Panda recently turned two years old, and opinions of Google’s search results since its implementation vary.
Image: Tekken 5 (via YouTube)