An interesting question about Google Panda came up in today’s Google Webmaster hangout, asking if forcing a recrawl of a site would cause Google’s Panda algo to reevalate it sooner.  If this was possible, this could definitely speed up Panda recovery time.

That said, before you get into the if it would work, there are limitations working against most site owners.  Unless the site was a pretty tiny site, a site owner can only request a limited number of page for Google to crawl, a limit that resets monthly.  But I could see people possibly triggering recrawls of the most important pages if it was possible for Panda would evaluate those pages faster.

So you can’t really request a recrawl of your whole domain using Search Console, you can submit individual URLs and say well this content has changed, please update that.   Or individual URLs using a submit to index tool but you can’t do that for your whole domain, there’s also the limit on the number of pages there.  So it’s not really possible to submit your whole domain to be recrawled anyway, but a lot of these processes work in parallel anyway.

The Panda algorithm will run in its cycle and the recrawling of individual pages works in its own cycle, some pages get crawled faster, some pages get crawled slower, all of that kind of happens in parallel. So it’s not the case where pushing one URL a little bit faster to the index will result in the other thing that is running in parallel updating that any faster.

With the rolling cycle of Panda, especially with any kind of “update date” no longer being known, the idea of forcing a recrawl is an interesting one to process Panda faster.  But while forcing a recrawl will prompt other search ranking signals to evaluate a page faster, Panda is still running on an independent cycle.