As you may be aware Google has recently pushed out a Panda update, but what many are now noticing is that Google’s latest update to Panda 4.2 has been rolling out slower than updates in the past. Google has already announced that this roll out would happen slowly over months instead of weeks due to technical reasons, but what does this mean for you?
Google’s John Mueller goes on the record to clear up some confusion surrounding the slower roll out. Mueller assures webmasters that this rollout is similar to past updates, it just may take longer due to technical reasons on Google’s end. The slow rollout may make it harder to notice if you are being hit with a penalty as your rankings will not fall drastically immediately. Instead, you may notice a slight gradual decline in rankings. Google’s Mueller made it clear that it is not Googles intention to confuse people with the slow rollout, but it is solely for technical reasons. They also reiterated that the slow rollout does not affect the crawling of sites. Sites will still be crawled and indexed at a normal pace. Many webmasters hope to see immediate results from the new update but with a slower rollout this won’t be the case.
Some speculate that Google may be rolling out this latest version of Panda slower to reduce the speed that websites are affected by the update, and move a step closer to making Panda updates a daily occurrence. Google has express interest in this in the past, although this doesn’t seem to be in the near future for Google. Webmasters may not be satisfied with Google’s answers as to why Panda 4.2 is rolling out so slowly but we will have to accept the fact that it may take many months for a site to see the impact of the update, negative or positive.