Over the past few days, even as far back as last Friday, I noticed a lot of chatter on a possible Google update.So yesterday, after returning from my family vacation, I emailed Google to confirm that an update was indeed happening. Shortly after receiving my email, they replied that they just confirmed it via Twitter.
Google said they rolled out a minor Panda refresh this past Monday on August 20th. This refresh only impacted less than 1% of search queries according to Google.
Panda data refresh this past Monday. ~1% of queries noticeably affected. More context: goo.gl/wQRZ0
— A Googler (@google) August 22, 2012
The previous Panda refresh was a month prior on July 24th.
I did receive emails from a few people who asked me to verify that this was a Panda refresh. Because they saw changes on their Panda penalized (pandalized) sites and wanted to know if they finally broke out of that penalty. Here is a screen shot from one site that recovered with this update:
