Google Launches a Slooooooow Panda Refresh. Here's what we know!

So it finally happened. After ten months of repeated promises from Google that Panda was coming (the most recent being from Gary Illyes at SMX Advanced) it finally waddled back onto the stage over the weekend of July 18.

For those keeping track this marks the 30th recorded public instance of Panda being refreshed or updated and this most recent iteration is being referred to as Panda 4.2. This new version is an "update" of the existing algorithm and according to Google, will affect only 2-3% of online queries.

The biggest criticism of the update so far has been its almost non-existent noted impact. Our own Google penalty expert, Casey Markee, tracks a small sample of audited sites that have had identified Panda issues and have been waiting for a refresh or update for months. As of this writing, he reports very little movement.

"Historically, Panda has been fully refreshed or updated in days or weeks. This is the first time Google has said it could take months. This is pretty disturbing really since it shows Google's still unable to process all this data in a timely matter. It also would seem to imply that Google is NOT close to fully integrating this into the regular algorithm, it's more of an aftermarket add-on at best."

At this point, it appears to be too early to really see much in the way of improvements for Panda-afflicted sites and site volatility tools like MozCast, SERPS.com and Algoroo all show little in the way of choppiness in the rankings. We'll keep you updated but to say this is a slow rollout would be an understatement; it's downright stationary at this point.

Now, besides this recent refresh of Panda, Google also provided a new piece of information on the algorithm that sent ripples through the SEO world for the first time in four years:

"Panda is not a page-specific algorithm, it's in fact sitewide."

This was reported by Barry Schwartz ...