Did Google Panda Just Update?

UPDATE: Google says that there was no update over the weekend

Well it seems that the online community are questioning whether Google were busy over the bank holiday weekend, with speculation and thoughts being discussed on a widespread basis towards whether Google had pushed an update of their Google Panda algorithm over the past couple of days.

Organic movements were being seen to increase/decrease starting on Friday morning and we saw positive client movement across a wide range of terms that simply looked to be too wide spread throughout the site to be simple daily fluctuations, although not all of the client or sites that we track within our in-house tools were seeing such movements, raising the question was there something else at play?

Well it seems that the movements that we saw at the back end of the week seemed to relate to something as over the weekend (mostly Sunday/Monday) we saw further client increases coming into force, with some terms jumping from as little as a single place to as many as 20+ places.

* I should point out that the rankings above are from the tool that we use in-house to monitor the top 30 results only.

Naturally we like to take a wider look at movement like these before we push out a blogpost, after all we want to ensure that what we have for you is going to be of interest, so we took a look at some of the organic ranking tracker tools out there to see what they were showing…

MozCast.com shows that there was a heated increase in the movements that they witnessed on Sunday, recording a score of 91 degrees on their ‘Algo Temperature' graph, while SERPS.com seemed to also see an increased level of movement within the results as you can see below:

With indications seemingly high that there was a ‘black and white force' at play over the weekend, this could symbolise that Google have finally gotten around to updating their Google Panda dataset, something that we know was overdue after the lack of suggestion that the algorithm had been updated as well as a comment by John Mueller of Google, who said that he thought that the last time the data was drawn was "in October" during a webmaster hangout back in March 2015.

Although the signs all point to the fact that the data has been refreshed, we have not been able to confirm this with Google as yet however in order to keep the Bronco update calendar up to date, we have pushed these changes onto the list as being unconfirmed at this moment in time.

Have you seen ranking movement over the weekend?

More elsewhere:
You can read Barry’s coverage of the potential update at SERoundtable here.

Google tells SER that there was NO Update over the weekend…