While we know that Google has been rolling out Panda 4.2 very, very slowly, the roll out is actually happening in pushed increments and isn’t a constant on-going rollout.

Glenn Gabe asked Gary Illyes & John Mueller on Twitter whether Panda was being manually pushed out in increments versus a single push that has been rolling out ever since. Illyes responded and said that yes, it is manually being pushed out incrementally.

This actually makes a lot of sense, based on what we have been seeing with what seems like no action for a while then a bit of fluctuation all at once…. but so slowly that it is very hard to see these changes pushed out if you look at algo weather metrics such as Mozcast to see it.

Update: Apparently there was some misunderstanding regarding the question and answer.  Illyes is now confirming that “push button manually, rolls out automatically for months. ‘yes’ was for that.”  And he further clarifies that “once we start the rollout manually, we don’t touch it.”