After being without a Google Panda refresh for about 10 months, Panda 4.2 update was released last week end (July 18) and confirmed by Google via Search Engine Land, Wednesday night, July 22.

Search Engine Roundtable confirmed the talk between Google and Search Engine Land that the latest Panda refresh began this weekend, around Saturday and is rolling out incredibly really slow. And since it is rolling out very slow, virtually no one noticed that this update is already affecting their websites somehow. It was evident on forums, as Search Engine Roundtable has observed, no one noticed the latest Panda refresh. 

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable pointed out  that, since this Panda refresh is incredibly slow, it may take up months to fully roll out. This will go on a site-by-site basis, not all of the pages may pick up on the roll out for months. But he stressed that it does not mean the algorithm is page-by-page basis, it is a site-wide algorithm. Google didn't tell though, why they are sending it out on this slow pace.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Land verified that the last time an official Panda refresh was almost 10 months ago. It was exactly rolled out on the name Panda 4.1 on September 25, 2014. And for the record, Search Engine Land even enumerated all the 29 confirmed Panda updates starting from the very first one, Panda Update 1, famously known as Panda 1.0, that started rolling four years ago back in Feb. 24, 2011.

Moreover, Suvaance reported that Google confirmed this Panda refresh has affected about 2%-3% of English language queries, which is relatively small compared to the past updates.

Suvaance laid down a few refresher info about Panda as a friendly reminder for SEO practitioners and webmasters. Once again, Panda was created to help the Google search engine differentiate more effectively between high quality sites with original & informative in-depth content to low quality sites having no value to users. Also, it is worthy of mention that it is a site-wide penalty, meaning a site with enough low quality pages would be impacted as a whole including its high quality pages also.