Matt Cutts: Google Tries To Minimize Search Updates Before Holidays

I am not sure if you noticed but all the Google search results tracking tools flared up yesterday reporting major changes in the Google search results. You can see for yourself at MozCast, SERPs.com, SERP Metrics and Algoroo. But I personally saw very little chatter about any changes in the search results outside of major authorship reduction and even that is somewhat questionable.

Matt Cutts, Google's lead guy here, responded to an angry tweet from a website owner saying Google doesn't do major updates before holidays. Here are the tweets:

@Bessian Actually, we try to minimize major updates right before the holidays.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 18, 2013

So are those tracking tools wrong? Is Matt Cutts lying? Is he not aware of something that is going on? Did Google not do an algorithm update but some user interface change is messing up the tracking tools?

Again, I don't see signs of an update based on webmasters complaining about ranking changes.

Did you notice changes in your traffic or rankings?

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.

Image from here when trying to find an image of someone being rejected or denied (cats are good)