There is no doubt in the vast majority of SEOs and Webmaster's mind that there was indeed a search algorithm change last week with Google. Google wouldn't confirm it but did tell us it was not related to Panda or Penguin.
But since it was fairly significant, at least to a nice number of webmasters, we are still asking, what was this update.
Throughout the weekend and over the past few days, I've been hearing people saying this mostly impacted commerce, e-commerce, related web sites. Now the results are still fluctuating, so it might be Google testing something, but our friends at Search Metrics broke down their data for us.
In a post by Marcus Tober, he says it looks like this update seems to have focused mostly on brand e-commerce terms. Most around misspellings of brand keywords. Marcus said it is "mostly concentrated on e-commerce and keywords with measurable CPC."
He pinpointed a few keywords that were shuffled big time, such as [adiddas], [ebbay], [zapos] and others that focus on keywords that misspell the brand name. But also for real brand names, without the typos, such as [nike] and others. Marcus said:
It appears quite possible that Google tries to clean-up brand searches and therefore tries to adjust also typos. Since the development seems to not be finished, we will keep an eye on that.
Adding:
Brands seem to profit from the development, while other have lost a good chunk of rankings, e.g. sites in the fashion industry. Google seems to be optimizing brand searches. An interesting side effect: for keywords with typos the SERPs seemed to be strongly edited – and adjusted to the “correct” SERP.
Marcus also mentions mobile but says there isn't much evidence there, yet, to show anything.
The search results seem to be settling down a bit this weekend but who knows what today brings.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Twitter.
