At the end of July, Gary Illyes, web trend analyst of Google confirmed that the search engine has began rolling out Panda algorithm update version 4.2 and said this update will effecting up to 3% of queries. But different from previous algorithm updates, the new update will take a really long time to fully impacting websites. So, if your websites haven’t seen any impact from this update, don’t get too excited because in few months you will see the effect from the update.
The impact of Panda update is getting smaller and smaller, in the previous update; it was affecting around 3 to 5%, and before that was saw the affect up to 7.5% of queries. The new Panda update was rolled out just 10 months after the last update in September 2014. Panda 4.2 considered as the 30th Google algorithm update. It is difficult for SEO webmaster to see the effect of the update because the slow pace of it. The impact of Panda 4.2 is limited to around 3% of queries of English language. This can be good news or bad for many different website owners.
The good news of the new update is that if your site was the victim of last update in September, then Google is giving you a chance to recover. But only if you’ve made requirement changes on your site. The bad news is that you will see the improvement of your site ranking after some time. This is a change of pattern because the impact of the previous Panda update or any Google updates was seeing immediately after the update was rolled out.
About the slow pace of Panda 4.2, one of the Google’s representatives, John Muller, said in Google Hangout with SEO webmasters. He shared that the new algorithm update is going to take months to fully roll out; this is because there is an internal issue that related to technical reasons. But he claimed that the slow pace of rolling out the new Panda update is not to confuse people.
John said that the new Panda update is quite similar update to the previous one. Because of the technical reasons, that is why the update rolling out in slow pace. And Google are not trying to confuse people with the update. He explained that the new algorithm is crawling and indexing in normal speed and using that content to separate higher and lower quality website. The slow pace is not what they intended to do but it’s because internal issue from their side.