Over the past week or so, I have been waiting day by day because I really have this feeling that an update is about to kick off soon.
I see signals from webmasters who track the search results very carefully saying things like the rankings have drastically changed, and then come back in a few hours later to say things returned. When I see people who I trust report these things, day after day, it shows me that Google might be slowly testing something on the ranking side with a limited 2% of the searchers out there.
Again, this is all my speculation but I am surprised that we haven't had a bigger change yet based on all the chatter I've been seeing in the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread in the past week, but even more so in the past few days.
Here are some recent quotes from the thread:
Something started yesterday evening. Sudden drop in traffic. The remaining google traffic are full of homepage visits then exit.Last time is saw something bad like this, a new panda was released.
I'm seeing keyword stuffed pages/sites ranking well again in my widget sector, and I mean really stuffed, 20/30/40 times per page, meta, almost any opportunity, absolutely useless pages for visitors, awesome for G SERPs!
Some suspect a small Panda release happened last Friday but with Panda, it is hard to track since the roll out is so incredibly slow and gradual. Mozcast shows a spike on Friday, so did SERPs.com, SERP Metrics, Accuranker and RankRanger but nothing crazy high, just a blip. So maybe?
I wouldn't be surprised if we see something significant from Google soon or maybe not, since they run tests all the time and back them out because of potential issues?
We are still waiting on Penguin...
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
