Google Panda Update 3.5

Google rolled out a new search algorithm it says should better prevent webspam from polluting its search results. Who won and who lost? Searchmetrics has done a quick analysis. Winners include names like Poynter, Spotify and The Verge. Losers have some surprises like Cult Of Mac and Digg. But as it turns out, these are winners/losers are mostly likely reflecting a previously unconfirmed Panda Update, not the new algorithm change.

We’ve updated the lead and the headline of this story to reflect that this list is more about a Panda Update change rather than the new webspam fighting algorithm, as confirmed by the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts. I also made a few minor changes to the end of the story.

Cutts commented after the original story came out:

Hey Danny, there’s a pretty big flaw with this “winner/loser” data. Searchmetrics says that they’re comparing by looking at rankings from a week ago. We rolled out a Panda data refresh several days ago. Because of the one week window, the Searchmetrics data include not only drops because of the webspam algorithm update but also Panda-related drops. In fact, when our engineers looked at Searchmetrics’ list of 50 sites that dropped, we only saw 2-3 sites that were affected in any way by the webspam algorithm update. I wouldn’t take the Searchmetrics list as indicative of the sites that were affected by the webspam algorithm update.

Following up with Cutts on Twitter, he told me the Panda Update hit around April 19. The last update was Panda 3.4 on March 23, which Google had publicly shared.