Google Says No Panda Update Happened This Past Weekend

Google said on record there was no update over the weekend despite webmasters and SEOs noticing significant changes in their search rankings.

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There was a lot of speculation over the weekend, starting off on Friday morning and going through the weekend that there may have been a Panda or other Google update. Many SEOs and webmasters were asking if this was Panda related or something else.

I asked Google about it and they said no update happened over the weekend. Not just that there wasn’t a Panda update over the weekend, but there was no update over the weekend. Not Penguin, not top heavy, not any algorithm update.

Even after Google sent us the statement, there are still webmasters and SEOs not believing it. See the comments over here:

From where I stand, I see changes (sessions -10% to -20% and Serps variations) on 10 sites (10 countries) during the w-end. May not be panda updates, but something happened.

The webmaster and SEO discussion around this non Google update is still going on, and many webmasters are not understanding how there couldn’t have been an update.

Maybe this is related to other Google ranking changes that Google won’t disclose? It is hard to say but Google did say on record that there was no weekend update.

Postscript: We have an update, read our story named The Quality Update: Google Confirms Changing How Quality Is Assessed, Resulting In Rankings Shake-Up.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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