Official: Google Panda 2.3 Update Is Live

Google has confirmed to Search Engine Land that late last week, it pushed out a small update to the Panda filter.

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users,” a Google spokesperson told us. “This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year,” Google added.

Over the past week or so, I have been tracking the complaints in the various forums, including the large ongoing thread at WebmasterWorld.

At first, I felt the complaints suggested that Google was doing rolling updates of Panda, as opposed Panda updates being manually pushed out. I was wrong, they are still being pushed put manually, Google says.

Google told us “this update incorporates some new signals that help differentiate between higher- and lower-quality sites.” “As a result, some sites are ranking higher after this most recent update,” Google added.

Previous Panda Updates

So far, the Panda update schedule has been like this:

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)

The 2.1 to 2.3 dates are approximate. Google may have rolled them out just a bit earlier or later than those exact days. The bigger issue is that you can see a trend developing. About every month, Google reruns its Panda algorithm.

Each time Panda is run, there’s a chance some hit from the last update will improve, while other sites might see traffic drops. In between updates, changes people may make specifically in hopes of fixing a Panda problem won’t show any impact until the next update is run.

To understand more about this, how the periodic nature of Panda updates work, see Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update.