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Is Google Updating Its Ranking Algorithms? Some Webmasters Believe So

All the signals are pointing to a significant Google update over the past week. Here is what we think is going on.

Barry Schwartz on October 22, 2015 at 10:03 am

Over the past week, I’ve been tracking the webmaster and SEO community and data around Google’s rankings. From what I see, it seems as if Google has made more than their typical daily ranking tweaks over the past week. Webmasters, SEOs and even the automated rank checking tools have all set off strong signals of a larger Google change, one that would be similar to when Google releases a new or updated ranking algorithm.

We know that Google Panda 4.2 is a slow update and what webmasters are seeing now, might be related to that slow rollout. But I personally believe the October 14th changes spotted in Google is related to the slow Panda rollout, whereas the ranking changes between the 20th and 21st of October are not necessarily Panda related.

We asked Google if they made any updates or changes to their ranking algorithms or search quality algorithms, but they have yet to respond to our request.

Sometimes Search Engine Land reports these changes even without a comment from Google because we feel there are enough webmasters and SEOs who are seeing evidence of such a change. To not report the change because Google has not given us confirmation would almost be unfair to the hundreds of webmasters asking why their rankings dropped or increased suddenly over the past week or so.

To summarize, we see two different update cycles from Google in the past week or so:

(1) October 14th through October 15th, that I personally believe is an ongoing Panda rollout.

(2) October 20th through October 21st, that I personally am unsure if it is Panda related or something else. I suspect it is a mix of Panda and potentially some other ranking adjustment Google may have made.

If we get a statement from Google, we will update you immediately.

Postscript: Gary Illyes from Google commented on Twitter that Google does not confirm core search algorithm changes and this may be one. Here is the tweet:

@AGr4ves Sorry, Alex, we don't confirm updates to our core ranking algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to it, this could have been one.
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 22, 2015

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.