Earlier this month, Gary Illyes from Google said a Panda update would be rolling out within the next 2-4 weeks. The recent shakeup in search engine results that people have seen this weekend is a separate issue, as confirmed by John Mueller in today’s Webmasters Hangout. Mueller also confirmed that we will be seeing a Panda refresh in the next couple of weeks.
Google Panda was an update to Google’s ranking algorithm originally pushed in February 2011. Panda’s goal was to increase the SERP presence of more robust websites with higher-quality content, and reduce the presence of thin, lower-quality sites. In its early days, Panda was updated around once per month. Since then, updates have been less frequent, but increasingly important as Panda becomes more and more refined.
We should not expect to see sites penalized by Panda to benefit from the new update, as Google is likely refining their detection of quality content to be more accurate. If you haven’t already, now is the time to revise your site content to be higher quality, and submit your site for Googlebot to crawl it.