There has been a crazy amount of weekend chatter around a Google update, possibly Panda - all of which Google said no to. But it doesn't stop people from asking about it.
Even though I got official word there was no "update" over the weekend, webmasters simply are seeing huge shifts and want to know if I got the message wrong.
@thebcco asked Gary Illyes from Google about the fluctuations, in which Gary responds with a picture of a famous animated GIF that looks like this:
Here is the tweet:
@thebcco pic.twitter.com/4pYE8cK80v
— Gary Illyes (@methode) May 6, 2015Yesterday in a Google+ hangout with Google's John Mueller at 50:30 mark someone asked about it as well, and John Mueller responded "we didn't update anything."
He said in long form:
We didn’t update anything that I’m aware of. I saw Barry’s blog post about some changes he was seeing on the weekend. But that’s not related to panda or penguin, we essentially make updates all the time, so these are changes as normal.
So what is going on? As I mentioned over here, I am suspecting the terminology of "update" is different from within Google than what we understand. Maybe when I ask if there was an update, they think spam algorithms? Maybe something else updated outside of spam impacting the Google results? Most likely I think. But what do we know, we are just webmasters tracking our performance in the SERPS and conversions.
