“giant-panda-mother-and-cub-molong-nature-reserve-china-pictures” ©2011 by mrs.gsoell is licensed under CC BY 2.0
It was a just a couple short months ago that Google told us we wouldn’t have to worry about Panda updates for awhile. They claimed that Panda was being worked into the rolling algorithm updates and there would be no more specific “Panda” labeled action. Well, Google is already going back on that promise. Just this past Friday, Google released another Panda update. Were your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts affected?
Let’s find out.
First, let’s look at the good news. This is the smallest Panda update we’ve seen so far, with a small (but still not exactly known) number of searches affected. Less websites were hit, so the likelihood that you’re one of them is lower than ever. Not a lot to be excited about, but we take victories where we can find them. The other good news is that impressions seem to be up for a lot of sites who deliver quality SEO. The strange thing is that traffic hasn’t seen a corresponding bump. This means that, most likely, this new Panda update has somehow affected the way Google measures impressions.
Another change of note is that authority seems to have gotten another bump. Sites that have authorship activated, along with an active Google+ presence, have seen slight increases in their traffic. Sites that have been ignoring Google+ have seen slight dips in traffic. If you haven’t set up authorship yet, this is another great reason to go ahead and get that done.
The update is slated to roll out over the course of this week. We’ve already seen these trends in the first few days, but we can be sure there are more to come. We’ll keep you updated as we hear more news and see more changes.