Google assured the Panda update report with us. The company said they have done refreshing data of Google Panda algorithm about a week, and added that there were no additional signals or algorithm changes. This was only a data refresh.
I have seen reports over the past week or so of webmasters pointing out about their rankings. Most were complaintive that they lost rankings, but some said websites that were originally hit by Panda recovered their traffic levels pre-Panda. This would explain the data refresh, where Google ran the algorithm and updated the sites that should or should not have been touched by Panda.
Google Panda 3.2
Google told it was happened about only week or so, therefore I would spot this Google Panda 3.2 latest as occurrence on January 18, 2012.
Why 3.2 and not 2.x? Well, I spoke with a Google back in late November; they explicit that one of the 2.x updates we mark as a minor modernize, should have likely been named as a major update and thus marked a 3.0 update. Personally I believe that was an October Panda update, that we did not cover here, but I do not have confirmation on that. In fact, Google does not number their updates, so it is hard to nail down.
The 3.1 update was probably the minor update from November and now this being a basic “data refresh,” we’d label this as a minor update as well, and call this the 3.2 update.
There was a long gap between this update and the update from November because Google promised us no Panda updates during vacations.
Previous Panda Updates
Following are the Panda update timetable so far
- Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
- Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
- Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 week gap)
- Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
- Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
- Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
- Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
- Panda Update 3.0 : October 19, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
- Panda Update 3.1 : November 18, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
- Panda Update 3.2 : January 18, 2012 (about 2 month gap)
