Despite Google saying nothing is going on, we've been seeing signs of major changes and reports of major changes in the Google search results and rankings.
Again, over the weekend, I've been getting private emails with tons of public chatter in the WebmasterWorld and even BlackHatWorld forums about Google making a lot of changes over the weekend.
Some are suspecting a massive Penguin update is about to hit, while others think it might be a Panda refresh and others think it is just Google's normal actions on link networks. It is almost impossible to tell without a confirmation from Google, for all we know, it can be all three or more.
Even the tracking tools are all over the place, it seems like it even broke MozCast, SERPS.com shows major activity on Saturday, so does SERP Metrics and Algoroo.
Here are some recent chatter comments from the forums:
Regardless of the weather anywhere overall my lowest-ever page views at 45.7% of 2014 average with the UK at 37.4% however fortunately not as bad as Friday at 26.5%, what a mess.
i did a small analysis.. i used two of my sites and ranked purely with GSA and 10 articles scraped and smashed one was used. it got hit.for my one another site i used 5 unique articles, spun with wordai, smashed as 1 articles with GSA.. it got hit but only 4-9 position drops.. not like first one..
so its getting clear that its penguin 3.0
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and BlackHatWorld.
Update: On May 20th we got confirmation from Google that this was an update to the Google Spam algorithm. And Google has also released a major update to the Panda algorithm today, which began rolling out today, May 20th.
