Back in the good old days, I use to simply use the chatter in the SEO discussion forums to communicate with you all if I feel there was a major or minor Google Algorithm update. Now we have dozens of tools from companies like Moz, SEMRush, RankRanger, Algoroo, Advanced Web Rankings, Accuranker, SERP Metrics and more that track the search results daily and see if there are any shifts in the results as a whole.
Personally, I still prefer to watch the forums and community to say if there is a major or minor algorithm update happening. In the past few months most of the tools have been reporting incredible shifts in the search results on a daily basis. In fact, Accuranker this week adjusted there signals to lower it based on the patterns they have been seeing over the past few months.
This morning, Google's John Mueller made a comment on Twitter calling these tools "blackhat scrapers" when questioned about any ranking changes happening based on the tools reporting them.
Or maybe it's just blackhat scrapers having a hard time?
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) August 17, 2017
Google has never been a fan of these tools, sometimes saying they pick up on the wrong signals.
Truth is, Google is often not a fan of my reports. Google makes changes every day, blah blah blah, more on that over here.
In short, I personally do like the tools as a backup for the forum chatter I track. I can tell you that over the past few months, the tools have all been insane and the forums chatter has not. So something is off. I am not sure what it is.
But I have not seen a significant update in some time.
Of course, all of you know that it is against Google's terms of service to do automated queries on their search engine. But typically Google has turned their head towards this and have not really blocked most tools that do this.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
