Google’s Panda Dance: Matt Cutts Confirms Panda Rolls Out Monthly Over 10 Of 30 Days

At SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, announced that the Panda algorithm is still being updated roughly every month, but that update is rolled out slowly throughout the month. It is like a Google Dance, but in this case, a Panda Dance.

What happens is Google will run the update on a particular day, let’s say on the 4th of the month. Then Google will slowly push out that impact over 10 days or so throughout the month. Google will typically repeat this cycle over monthly.

Google said in March that they will stop announcing Panda update because they were more of a rolling update. By rolling update, Google means that it is pushed out monthly, but pushed out over a 10 day cycle or so.

Why are we calling it the Panda Dance? Back in the early early days of Google, SEOs were obsessed with the Google Dance. Back then, Google pushed out monthly Google updates, and SEO’s watched the Google data centers to see the rankings dance.

For more of our coverage on Matt’s talk at SMX Advanced see Google’s Cutts Talks Structured Data Beta, Mobile Site Speed Need, Penalty Notices To Get Example Links & More.

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.