Over the past 36 hours or so, I've been tracking a level of chatter in the industry around a possible Google update. Some are telling me they are seeing huge changes in their rankings and traffic from Google. Others are saying spammers have returned to the Google search results. Either way, I am getting this from forum threads, tweets and detailed emails with charts of traffic changes. So something is going on.
I will say, the levels of chatter are not that of a Penguin refresh or even Panda update.
Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that he has nothing to announce, it might just be the 100s of changes they make to their search results every year. So clearly he is not aware of any search quality update that happened, it doesn't mean there wasn't a core search change in Google.
@dawnieando @rogala_pro @methode most likely, yes. We make 100s of changes every year. Don't have anything more specific to announce, sorry!
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) November 19, 2015The monitoring tools, some, not all, show changes as well:
MozCast spiked:
RankRanger shows movement:
Advanced Web Ranking:
SERP Metrics also:
SERPs.com and Algoroo do not show much change. So it might have just hit certain queries or specific types of sites.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has some chatter:
Just started to see lots of wrong country hits to many of our sites, this usually happens when google launches some new twist to the algo. Revenue still strong, just lots of world-wide traffic added to local USA & Canada sites making it appear that we are getting an upsurge in traffic numbers, but the extra will never convert.
In my niche there is was an partial roll back to very old serps. Serps that don´t even match the query but lots of brands showing up.My guess is that this was an quality update. It helps the user to find more compelling websites, that google is thinking will help the user to find what he wants.
Seeing really positive Panda movement as of today in the UK. All my sites are making progress. Multiple verticals.
I'm seeing a lot of change here in the UK too. Links are king; bought or otherwise (mainly bought).
Seen some major dips and spikes on certain keywords on my US and UK sites. Others are just flat!
It goes on and on with the chatter. Of course, this might be Panda slowly continuing to roll out? But I doubt it - I mean, I doubt it is related to the slow Panda roll out, I do think Panda is still slowly rolling out nevertheless.
Here is one of many tweets:
@rustybrick hello sir i wan to know is google update their algorithm? I'll see huge change on my website traffic.
— Pravi goyal (@shehzaadagoyal) November 19, 2015Do you see any changes?
Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.
