There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update over the past couple of days; on April 28th and 29th. There is chatter within the SEO industry and some of the tools are showing pretty heavy signs of an update.
The chatter is not extreme, and to make it complicated, there was an Google Analytics issue the other day for a few hours. So that muddled the chatter between those really seeing changes in rankings and those seeing a bug with Google Analytics.
Here is some of the chatter at WebmasterWorld:
woke up today to a total google reshuffle in my niche.. extreme ranking loss and lots of low quality (spam link) sites ranking highanyone noticing anything similar or is this something that happened before and just caught up to my niche?
Yup seen a few obvious spam sites rising. One link I saw rise out of no where redirects to a #*$! site and if you look at the google cache of the page it is some stolen page with the content words just jumbled (it doesn't make sense anymore). Not sure how Google cannot still detect these types of sites.
..and now, few hours later, my traffic and most of my ranks are back where they were, almost all normalI don't think I've ever seen such a quick re-shuffle and shuffle back to ordinary. I was nowhere in top 100 for any of my highest keywords and now strongest ones are back in top 10 as before.
Will be interesting to monitor this further.....
Things are looking better on my end, it appears up to date. They also added an extra 10 to 15% in traffic as compared to the same day last week. Let's see if it holds.
The same thing happened to my site last night. Google tanked the rankings for nearly all search terms. Feels like the whole domain has been punished for some random reason. Unfortunately it has not recovered rankings yet like StoneSolid's did. Depressing.
Here are some of the charts from the tracking tools.
Did any of you notice improvements or changes?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
