Google: Panda 4.2 Is Rolling Out Slowly For Technical Reasons

Google's John Mueller tries to explain why the Panda 4.2 rollout is happening so slowly over months and months.

google-panda-cop3-fade-ss-1920

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:


Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.


About the Author

Barry Schwartz

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.