The Google Panda Weekend Update: A Surprising Turn of Events?

When I look outside the window, I wonder how cops manage traffic jams with such efficiency. After 8 in the evening, a flood of trucks and giant containers flock the highway across the city. Pedestrians, taxi drivers, and every working professional getting home is frantically looking for traffic updates for a smoother ride. Unfortunately, I can only look from a relatable lens that is, from the viewpoint of a person stuck in a jam or one who is managing it. What about the bigger picture? What about the flowchart of the traffic? Are there any metrics to anticipate the flow in advance? These bring me to the speculations of a Panda Update, soon to hit the floor in days to come, or not!

Many users have associated this sudden and continuous fluctuation in traffic and visibility to Google Dance, a phenomenon that simply points out ‘index in motion’. Right now as we speak, Twitter is flooding with metric updates depicting drastic rise or fall of traffic and visibility. Some comments chirp with positive updates of this fluctuation and the user seems to have experienced traffic growth like never before. From one of the comments which I figured came from the owner of a startup company, Google Panda seemed to have finally showered some love, unusual and drastic as it was. Unfortunately, one of them had a tough time dealing with progressively declining (pun intended) traffic and the figures are extremely poor to begin with. The change seems to have taken place overnight, carrying the SEO spin to the next level.

These updates had me tempted to look into metric sites to witness a real time update myself. The forecasts projected on one of the metric portals was unusually bright, showing 58% improvement for desktop websites and a whopping 79% for mobile friendly sites. Such spikes were witnessed all through the weekend with changes still being incorporated for the Sunday forecast. The latest volatility index statistic still depicts traffic at an all time high. While these speculations are supported by stats across Mozcast, SERP Metrics, and Algoroo, Google Analytics does not point towards any remarkable change in the referrals.

This brings me back to my analogy of road traffic. Quite like Google Dance, the traffic seems to intensify and loosen up at irregular intervals. Only at times there are concrete reasons like accidents or really giant containers blocking the road. But in the regular rhythm of things, this disorderly chaos never seems to make sense. At around the same time, roads can be empty or thoroughly jammed for no rhyme or reason. In this sense, explaining Google Panda is like trying to incorporate a fixed protocol into the traffic system. The simplest way of perhaps getting around the concept is to trust on unpredictable outcomes. You never know when a pipeline on the road bursts. You never know when a cow stalls in the middle of the road, causing all of traffic to halt. Panda updates are upgraded mantras for every SEO practice. The tides of change associated with indexing, traffic, and visibility can never be fixed. All that we can do is sync with its seemingly irregular regulations.

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