After months of relative quite, Google announced last week that they had begun rolling out the newest update to the infamous Panda algorithm, designed to reduce search engine rankings for low quality sites.
This update brings Panda (first released in 2011) to version 4.2, and is the 29th official update to the algorithm. According to Google, when the update is finished rolling out, 2%-3% of English language queries will be affected.
This update is also one of the slowest to be pushed out, and Google has said that it will be several months before it is fully in place.
Panda Recovery
If your site was penalised by Panda in the previous update, this refresh offers the opportunity to recover, provided of course that you made the necessary changes to the site to improve your content and site quality. Panda specifically targets sites with “thin” content, that Google feels do not provide sufficient information to meet searchers needs, but given how slowly this is rolling out, any recovery you’re due might not show up for some time yet.
In the past, the effects of Panda updates have been apparent relatively quickly, but this time rankings will improve (or decrease) gradually.