Google: Panda 4.2 Is Rolling Out Slowly For Technical Reasons

This morning, in a Google Hangout between Google’s John Mueller and webmasters, John was asked about the Google Panda 4.2 update several times. One question that came up was why it’s running slower than normal.

John explained that the rollout is taking months and months, as opposed to days or weeks, because of an “internal issue” related to “technical reasons.” But he explicitly said this rollout is not going slowly specifically to “confuse people.”

Both the SEM Post and Search Engine Roundtable transcribed part of this Q&A on Panda:

This [Panda rollout] is actually pretty much a similar update to before. For technical reasons we are rolling it out a bit slower. It is not that we are trying to confuse people with this. It is really just for technical reasons.

So, it is not that we are crawling slowly. We are crawling and indexing normal, and we are using that content as well to recognize higher quality and lower quality sites. But we are rolling out this information in a little bit more slower way. Mostly for technical reasons.

It is not like we are making this process slower by design, it is really an internal issue on our side.

A lot of webmasters want to see immediate results from Google’s Web spam algorithms, but with the Panda 4.2 slow rollout, it won’t be like that. It can take months and months for a site to fully see a positive or negative impact of the algorithm.

Here is the video embed at the start point:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.