Google Update Underway: But For Payday Or Panda?
There appears to be an update underway, one that will be rolling out over a “multi-week” timeframe according to Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts.
The update was announced by Matt on Twitter in response to a question about why some of the search results look spammy. Matt replied saying, “Yup we saw that. Multi-week rollout going on now, from next week all the way to the week after July 4th.”
It is unclear exactly what this is an update for. Is it in response to an update on the PayDay algorithm or maybe the softer Panda update? We asked Matt Cutts and Google to clarify but Google won’t clarify.
Google has said that Panda is a multiday update, so maybe this update is related to that. If that is true, we’d probably be at the 27th update to Panda. The last Panda update we counted was Panda 25 but Google stopped announcing them; however, we think there has been at least one Panda refresh since the last confirmed update.
Or, this update Matt is referring to may be designed to improve the situation with the PayDay loans algorithm having some oddities. Such as the example Matt responded to with a search for [car insurance] in Google UK and the Matt Cutts payday loan hack from a week ago. There are many examples of places where the payday loan algorithm did not remove spam, so this update might be related to that.
Have you noticed ranking and traffic changes from Google over the past few days? Let us know in the comments.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto.
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