Yesterday I saw signs of a spike in webmaster and SEO chatter about ranking changes in Google. That chatter has built up over the past 24 hours and the monitoring tools, most of them, have spiked as well. It looks like a more significant Google search ranking algorithm update was pushed out over the past 36 hours. It is hard to say exactly what happened but this is not at the levels of a major Penguin or Panda update but it is more significant than the daily Google updates does throughout the day.

Here are some of the comments from WebmasterWorld:

There are several threads at the Google Webmaster Help forums also, but here is one of them:

And some on Twitter also, here is one:

The example sites I’ve seen so far are ad heavy, low quality content sites but I only saw a handful of sites. It is way too early for me to say anything concrete about this update.

My concern is that Google said in the past, they will try to minimize updates before/during holidays and with black Friday and the big Thanksgiving shopping season next week, why now Google?

Here are some of the tools showing the update:

Mozcast:

Algoroo:

SEMrush:

RankRanger:

Accuranker:

SERPMetrics:

Do you see changes in your rankings and Google organic traffic over the past 24 hours?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google told us they have nothing to share about this, so essentially a no comment. 🙁