Multiple SERP-trackers and many webmasters reported major flux in Google SERPs. Speculation ranged from an e-commerce focused update to a mobile usability update. Google did not officially confirm an update.

What Is The Google Panda Update?

Google’s Panda Update is a search filter introduced in February 2011 meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. Panda is updated from time-to-time. When this happens, sites previously hit may escape, if they’ve made the right changes. Panda may also catch sites that escaped before. A refresh also means “false positives” might get released.

Google: Panda 4.1 Still Rolling Out

Updated on October 6, 2014 at 4:35 pm

Over the weekend, there was a tremendous amount of chatter within the SEO community, including discussion forums, social media and other channels. There were rumors that Google was pushing out a new algorithm, maybe the eagerly anticipatedPenguin refresh which is expected really soon or maybe something else?

Google told us just now that the Panda 4.1 release is still rolling out and that may be what SEOs and Webmasters are noticing.

Google launched Panda 4.1 on September 25, 2014 and told us it would be a “slow rollout” that would go into the following week. No one really expected the rollout to continue into this week but it has and the fluctuations and ranking changes you are seeing are likely related to that.

If you saw a huge drop in Google traffic, it may or may not be related to Panda 4.1. Google is constantly making changes and although you may notice a drop on the Panda 4.1 release date, you may have been impacted by other algorithms, user interface changes or manual actions. In addition, you might not notice a change on September 25th but notice one over this past weekend, which could also be related to Panda 4.1.

Google has confirmed with us that Panda 4.1 is still rolling out.

What is Canonicalization?
In web search and search engine optimization (SEO), URL canonicalization deals with web content that has more than one possible URL. Having multiple URLs for the same web content can cause problems for search engines - specifically in determining which URL should be shown in search results

What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing (sometimes called split testing) is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. You compare two web pages by showing the two variants (let's call them A and B) to similar visitors at the same time. The one that gives a better conversion rate, wins!

In marketing, a call to action (CTA) is an instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as "call now", "find out more" or "visit a store today".