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Friday, September 28, 2012

Google Panda Update 20 Released with Impact on 2.4% of English Queries

Google confirmed on Thursday, 27 September 2012, that they have released a Panda algorithm update. This is the 20th Panda update and thus it is named Panda 20. It is a fairly major Panda update that impacts 2.4% of English search queries and is still rolling out. Late Friday afternoon, Google announced a EMD (Exact Match Domain) update that removed the chances of a low-quality exact match domain from ranking well in Google. But over the weekend, many non-exact match domain site owners noticed their rankings dropped as well. What was it?

Google confirmed that they pushed out a new Panda algorithm update that is not just a data refresh but an algorithm update. Google told us this "affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice." There is more to come with this update, where Google promises to roll out more to this Panda algorithm update over the next 3-4 days. Here is the comment Google's Matt Cutts sent us after asking about this update


Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 27 Sep 12. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday, 27 September 2012, but the full roll-out is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example). The sad part is that there are many sites affected by either this Panda update or the EMD update and it is hard to know which update you were hurt by.