Google's Holiday Gift To Webmasters: No Panda Updates Till Next Year

Yesterday, I made an assumption that Google would put all Panda updates on hold until after the holiday season.

Google tweeted yesterday afternoon that there would be “no major Panda updates until the new year.”

The last Panda update we had was labeled a “minor” update on November 18th and since then, it has been pretty quite on the Panda update side of things.

Google typically does not do major algorithm updates during the holiday season in order to not impact online retailers that much during their most critical business sales time of the year. This all stems from the historic Florida update that put many online retailers out of business right before the biggest holiday retail season.

Here is Google’s tweet:

Search weather report: no major Panda updates until the new year. Context: goo.gl/XqLuN

— A Googler (@google) December 14, 2011

Previous Panda Updates

Here’s the Panda update schedule so far, as we’ve tracked and had confirmed by Google:

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 3.1?: November 18, 2011 (about 7 week gap)

Since then we have not been tracking the Panda fluxes that closely.

(stock image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.)

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Panda Update | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Other ways to share:

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://optimizehere.co Matt

Thanks Google. Sorry, all we got you this year was a few XML sitemaps.
colloco

Kind of forgot that “minor” Oct. 13 one in the recap, didn’t you?
http://www.oceanofweb.com Atul Kumar

Google Panda is killing all of us continuously
I think Google should post some guidelines about recovering on this Panda
http://mac-seo-tools.com Glenn Bearsky

Uh, WHICH webmasters? The title should be “Google’s Gift To Dominant Retailers – No More Updates Until The Big Boys Have Cashed-In On The Holidays.” In effect the sharp-knived Mid-October and subsequent updates assured just that, a major traffic displacement in favor of the old guard.

And if you haven’t noticed, the ‘freeze’ in place assures that whatever content quality, on-page and fresh updates you might try to do in the meantime _really doesn’t and won’t help most sites_

Many of use are hosed until Google twiddles the knobs again in January. But I don’t think the next big Panda tweak is going to somehow restore things to ‘Normal’. There is no normal anymore in Google’s ever-tightening noose and consolidation to power and authority at the top.
Andy

Hardly a ‘holiday gift’ when you can’t afford to buy your family presents after being mauled by the Panda on Oct 14th. 2 months without any income – I just love ‘em!

In Google’s ideal world it will have successfully created so many unfathomable guidelines that there will be no websites in its index, and then SEO’s can comment on the quality of content and keyword density in adwords!
http://www.domainnameguide.org D.N.G.

Also, a bit surprised that you left out the mid-October update. Seems plenty of people took big traffic hits with that update.