Those Google Ranking Shifts Are Not A Google Update, Google Denies Any Algorithmic Changes

Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of various signals across the search community that Google’s algorithms and rankings were updating; so much so that people were bracing themselves for a major Penguin or Panda-like algorithm announcement from Google. Google never made the announcement, and so I asked Google if anything […]

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Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of various signals across the search community that Google’s algorithms and rankings were updating; so much so that people were bracing themselves for a major Penguin or Panda-like algorithm announcement from Google.

Google never made the announcement, and so I asked Google if anything was going on. Google told me that nothing was going on, that there is nothing going on at their end that would result in what is being reported by the community.

Where are the reports? On May 2nd, I noticed a lot of discussion in the SEO forums about an update, then the same type of chatter spiked up on May 7th, with some rumors of a reversal of those changes over the weekend. I imagined that Google was testing something, pushing it out heavily, then pulling it back and getting ready to launch something big.

The Google tracking tools showed similar patterns, including MozCast, SERPS.com, SearchMetrics and Algoroo:

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Patrick Altoft even spent the time documenting how SearchMetrics marked that major media sites took a dive last week in the search results, assuming this was a Panda refresh of some sorts.

Well, it is not, at least according to a Google spokesperson.

Of course, Google could have used the statement that they make 500 or so changes per year to their search engine.


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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