Has Panda 2.5 Hit?
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I'm sure a few people have been asking this direct question throughout the forums but most of them are masked by indirect questions like "my traffic has dipped" and the like. Does anyone have a firm confirmation that Panda has hit?
My indication that it has hit is that I'm experiencing a ~%30 increase in traffic to my e-commerce client from organic searches after this past weekend. We haven't made any significant changes to content besides daily postings, but even that doesn't account for a %30 spike that has maintained for 3 days straight.
So again, what have you guys experienced? Anything to support this?
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The trick is, Google isn't going to issue a release saying that they DIDN'T do an update, unless everyone seems convinced they did. Even then, they aren't consistent. It used to be that we didn't get official notifications of algo updates at all - that's a pretty recent development.
The last official roll-out was the global release on August 12th, which some called Panda 2.4 (although I think of it as just 2.3 to a broader audience).
Given the timing of Panda data updates, it is possible to see the impact of a Panda release a couple of weeks after it happens, but a 30% traffic increase doesn't sound like Panda, unless your competitors got hit. Has you ranking changed? Which keywords have more volume? Are there seasonal trends going on? You need to dig deep into the data, but it's not pointing to Panda from what I can tell.
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We're not seeing it anywhere...
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I hear you, but if Barry writes that Google told me that no update is running, I trust him. I don't think he was referring to the bath cleaners of the Google office when saying "Google".
Mine is just a reminder that before looking at major algo changes is always better to (re)control all the other potential reasons of a ranking change.
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I've seen Barry's post, however he doesn't cite an actual source or release. While I do enjoy Barry's site I don't really trust information from an unnamed, unofficial source. Does anyone have a release saying it?
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No... Panda 2.5 is not here. At least that's what Google itself told to Barry Schawrtz of Serountable.com here:
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Why? To improve search results.
When? It's impossible to say
It could happen on Christmas Day for all we know. -
I'm glad my rankings are not suffering but still begs the question why? And what day?
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I have read around forums quite often actually that people's rankings are suffering so possibly however I don't think it's anything concrete at the moment, I think it's just a case of seeing more than usual
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