One of the big differences with the latest Google Panda refresh was that Google is rolling it out over months, rather than just days or weeks.  And its slowness has led to many problems by SEOs to actually determine if it has hit certain sites or not (positive or negative) and it doesn’t show up on Google algo weather casts, such as Mozcast.  But it looks like this slow change is here to stay.

In yesterday’s hangout, Gary Illyes addressed some of the real time versus rollout refreshes and the slowness.

With Panda, we are still talking about refreshes.  And as far as I know, these refreshes will be rolled out really slow.  This is an infrastructure change on our end and I think we are going to stick with it.

This also confirms what John Mueller said back in July about the new slowness being for technical reasons and not for any other nefarious reason.

There are definitely mixed reactions about the slow rollout compared to previous Panda rollouts.  It is a lot harder for people to know if their Panda problems have been solved or if they have been hit with a new Panda issue.

Having a rollout over months means it is much harder to identify trends with the latest rollout to see what things are getting caught in it, and what isn’t.  While this latest Panda was merely a refresh and not a true update with new and/or different signals, it can seem like it when you consider new SEO techniques that have become more popular in the year since the previous Panda hit.