Confirmed: A Panda Refresh, Version #23

Dec 21, 2012 • 8:46 am | comments

(68) by Barry Schwartz | Filed Under Google Search Algorithm Updates

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Google Panda Holiday Update: Google has confirmed that this is a Panda refresh. This would make it version 23 and it impacted about 1.3% of English based queries.

I should note, I am shocked they pushed out a refresh before the holiday seasons. Last year they promised they would not do a Panda update before the holidays. What a difference a year makes.

A week ago, we reported on some very strong signs of a Google Update last Thursday. Google told us there was no update, not Panda and not anything. Webmasters feel Google is either lying or are clueless

That being said, there are now new reports in the same WebmasterWorld thread of an update hitting a few hours ago in the Google search results.

Someone even asked me on Twitter if there was a Panda update:

@rustybrick looks like a panda update today Barry?
— Tom Mcloughlin (@seo_travel) December 21, 2012

In the WebmasterWorld thread, here are some of the posts:

Looked like something got rolled back to me. My positions have all reverted to where they were last week.

There has been some shuffling overnight (in which my main key term page has gone from page 2 to page 4).

Now it is really early and the reporting tools have yet to report as of this morning, including MozCast, SERPmetrics and SERPS.com. Although, since this seems to have been updating early this morning, the tools may not show anything until tomorrow.

Google has confirmed a Panda refresh impacting 1.3% of queries!