Over the past 10 days I’ve been noticing some dramatic shifts on keyword ranking across all of our sites. I don’t mean the usual mid-monthly, ‘Google Dance’, I’m talking keywords flying in from nowhere to the first page of Google, hanging around for a day or so and then disappearing as quickly as they arrived.
With this in mind, it came as no great surprise to me when Google announced that it had started to ‘slowly’ rollout Panda 4.2 last weekend. I say that because we all know that Google never actually tell you when it starts an algorithm update and by the time they do it’s usually well underway.
So, with 10 months since the last Panda bashing, what’s in store for us this time around?
Well, they are saying that the rollout is going to be slow, which isn’t what I’ve been noticing over the past couple of weeks, so the shifts I’ve been seeing could have been due to another update. That being said, since they announced the rollout, things do seem to have settled down.
Google are saying that about 2-3% of websites should be affected by this latest update.
Any new Panda update means that if you have been penalised in the past and have made efforts to rectify things, you should start seeing the fruits of your labour, albeit more slowly than the ‘rip the band-aid off’ updates of the past.
It also means that if you haven’t been playing by the rules, you may get hit I would imagine equally slowly by this latest update.
I’m pleased to say that the volatility that I spoke of at the start of this article has settled down with all keywords sitting nicely in higher positions than before it began.
As for the long-term SEO effects of this slow rollout, all we can do is wait and see…
