Google May Be Updating Their Algorithm But They Won’t Confirm It

Today, September 4th, and last week, August 21st, there were huge spikes in chatter amongst the SEO and webmasters about the Google search results shifting and changing. In short, many SEOs and webmasters were complaining that their rankings in the Google search results have declined drastically. In addition, many sent me images of their analytics, […]

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google logo - basic 570x270Today, September 4th, and last week, August 21st, there were huge spikes in chatter amongst the SEO and webmasters about the Google search results shifting and changing.

In short, many SEOs and webmasters were complaining that their rankings in the Google search results have declined drastically. In addition, many sent me images of their analytics, showing a clear significant drop in traffic from the Google organic source.

I asked Google about both these updates, and for each one, they said they have “nothing to announce.” Meaning, they won’t confirm if there was or was not an update.

We can confirm that the various search results monitoring tools, such as Mozcast, SERPs.com, SERP Metrics and Algoroo all showed volatility on August 21st. Since the September 4th chatter began this morning, we will have to wait for tomorrow to see if the tools show activity for today (the tools are about 24 hours delayed).

Although, there are hundreds of comments on the August 21st post and well over fifty comments on the September 4th post in less than seven hours.

Google does not always confirm updates but we think you should be aware that on August 21st and September 4th, there was enough noise to report to you that Google may have done some sort of algorithmic update.

For more info on the more popular Google updates, see our Google Panda and Google Penguin categories.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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