Starting around Friday, April 30th but really spiking a lot on Saturday, May 1st, we are seeing signs of another big Google search ranking algorithm update. There are signs that this update had a big impact on the Product Reviews update as well. It is hard to say if they are separate or maybe Google rolled out something, unconfirmed, that impacted product reviews and other categories of sites?
Right now, I am seeing significant signs that those impacted by the product reviews update saw a change this past Friday, Saturday and so on. Maybe Google made a tweak to the product reviews update? Google said it would not confirm. all changes to this specific update. But also, this update is very similar to a core update, to how it acts and maybe something larger was rolled out that impacted both product reviews and other categories. This is all a guess but all I know is that I am seeing signs from both the tracking tools and the community of big changes this past weekend – and it is bigger than last weekend.
The chatter in the SEO community is pretty heavy, here is a summary of that chatter at both WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World:
I think many of these comments are specific to affiliate and product review sites but not all.
Glenn Gabe shared some interesting tweets with charts of product review sites he has been following and make sure to see his analysis of that update:
There is some chatter of indexing issues also, which seems to be more frequent in the past several days – maybe that is why Google released this tool?
Now let’s look at the tracking tools…
So check your traffic, rankings and all things Googlely and I hope you did well with this unconfirmed update.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
