Technology companies update their products more than often to make them better suit their consumers. Technical changes usually go unnoticed, but that does not apply to Google.
Google is always innovating. And when it do, it's not always fond of saying what they actually do, especially in technical terms of its algorithms. But the company still give some clues of what's going to happen before it happens.
Google's algorithms are updated once in a while to give better service to those that uses its search engine. As a company that provides the most sophisticated and popular search engine, even a small change to its algorithm can give significant effects. Google recently updated its Panda algorithm, but this time, people won't see any much changes.
Dubbed the Panda 4.2, Google is rolling out the change slowly and steadily, starting July 18th, 2015. Many webmasters may not notice the change immediately.
The company said that the update takes months to fully rollout opposed to the usual days or weeks. Any changes in traffic or ranking won't be noticeable, but when they do, webmasters won't see the change at once.
Google said this affected about 2–3 percent of English language queries.
A Technical Reason, And The Benefits To The Small
This Panda update is pretty much similar to the previous Pandas. But for some technical reasons, Google is releasing it slowly, and that's not because that the search engine giant is trying to confuse people.
John Mueller who hosted a Google Webmaster Office Hours answered the question as he was asked about the Panda refresh a couple of different times.
"This is actually pretty much a similar update to before. For technical reasons, we are mostly rolling out a bit slower. It's not that we are trying to, I don’t know, confuse people with this, it's really just for technical reasons," he said.
When he was asked for clarification if the slow rollout has any impact on crawling and indexing, again he stated that the rollout is slow due to technical reasons.
"It's not that we're crawling slowly, we are crawling and indexing normal and using that content as well to recognize higher quality and lower quality sites. But we are rolling this information in a little bit slower way, mostly for technical reasons."
The Panda 4.2 is a data refresh which was based on users and webmasters' feedback the company received. And for that, the algorithm update offers a greater diversity of high-quality contents from small- and medium-sized websites to rank higher.
Google also gives some indications that smaller content publishers to be the most benefited in this update.
Panda 4.2 is a relatively small update. The Panda algorithm that was first introduced on February 2011 aims to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. Despite affecting a small percentage of queries, Google that processes billions of searches a month means that the change leads to millions of search results with different rankings.
The update also includes new filters for web spam.
The Chance To Change
The Panda 4.2 slow rollout benefited some webmasters as they aren't fully caught at once. This Panda update effects are not like how other previous versions did. Typically, those that got caught would see a significant increase or decrease on their website's ranking and traffic.
The slow rollout also means that webmasters and web owners can do some changes to their sites in order to correct and before getting the full impact of it.
For those that got caught by the previous Panda (version 4.1), this slow rollout is Google's offering for another chance to recover.
