There was a time when talk of Google Penguins and Panda's brought everyone in the digital marketing out in a cold sweat.
But huge gaps between releases have now given way to longer roll outs, to the point no one really seems to know what Google is up to these days!
For those unfamiliar with Google Pandas, this post will explain: what is a Google Panda?
The latest roll out, badged as Panda 4.2 seems to be quite pedestrian in its deployment, confusing most in the SEO industry, as previous monitoring methods can't take into account such a slow roll out.
Search Engine Land reported Google engineer John Mueller explaining that the rollout is taking months and months, as opposed to days or weeks, because of an “internal issue” related to “technical reasons.” But he explicitly said this rollout is not going slowly specifically to “confuse people.”
Search Engine Land - Panda 4.2 Is Rolling Out Slowly For Technical Reasons
Hmm, maybe the internet has grown too big for Googles infrastructure? There has been some talk for a while that the Google web crawlers that visit your web pages, may visit your pages less as they struggle to catalogue the worlds pages.
So optimising important pages is a must if you want to maximise your "crawl budget". As the internet continually expands, the catalogued search index held by Google must be immense. To then apply an algorithm update to it, which I assume in reality is rebuilding that search index with the new factors applied is going to obviously take some time.
Throw in one of those famous technical problems any one who works with computers has from time to time, then scale it up to a Google size, and we have a very slow Panda. So maybe it's fair to say the Panda has turned into a Turtle?
Does anyone worry about Panda or Penguin updates? Do you worry or understand about your crawl budget?
