What is your hypothesis why Panda/Penguin recoveries happen over months after an algorithm update rather than over night?

[italiansoc]

We have experienced many scenarios were ranking recoveries from clear Panda and Penguin penalties on our sites don't necessarily happen with the launch of a Panda/Penguin update but instead trickle back in over weeks and months after a confirmed algo update. A good example is shown in the image which shows a panda recovery for a high volume keyword. What is your theory why these ranking recoveries happen over weeks vs instantly?

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[MarieHaynes]

Interesting graphic. It looks like that keyword plummeted in May of 2014. I'm assuming it must have been around May 20 when Panda updated? And then it made a comeback starting in the fall of 2015.

There were some potential Panda "tremors" in late 2015. (https://www.mariehaynes.com/algo-changes-and-more/). As Google doesn't announce each time they adjust Panda any more, we can often have Panda movement on days that aren't officially in the Moz list of Panda updates and refreshes. For example, on October 14/15, 2015 there were a lot of sites that were previously hit with Panda that saw some sort of improvement on that day.

I think it's quite possible that this is what happened for your site. It improved to page 2 or 3 or so and then, now that it had some kind of visibility had the chance to climb back to page 1.

The last official Panda update that Google announced started in July of 2015 but Google said it would be slow rolling and take several months to fully roll out. We still don't know whether that iteration is still slowly rolling along now.

Google did confirm recently that Panda is not yet baked into the algorithm but that it is considered a core part of the algorithm. It still does need to be manually refreshed however. So, it is my guess that in October of 2015 they manually refreshed or updated some portion of Panda and your site started to see improvement at that point.

[italiansoc]

Thank you for your input, your hypothesis that the initial increase to page 2 or 3 allowed the site to get traffic and gain traction through improved user engagement is an interesting one; however the traffic to those sites has been so minimal with the non top 10 rankings that I don't think it can be a key contributor.

I continue to wonder why these recoveries happen so gradually; I also noticed that the higher the keyword volume for a key word the slower the recovery.