Friday morning, November 8th, I saw a sprinkle of chatter across the industry about a Google search algorithm update. Some were claiming massive changes in traffic and rankings. But to be honest, the chatter was incredibly limited, that is until several hours later and now the chatter throughout the weekend is off the charts. By chatter, I mean the community talking about the changes in rankings and traffic from Google organic search. It is literally off the charts and I will share some of this chatter with you now.
The automated tracking tools are showing virtually no update since Friday, November 8th. Which is also weird and gets some speculation out that this is BERT related – which to be honest, makes no sense. Sorry.
In any event, this update seems to hit all niches, industries and verticals. I will add that the Black Hat forums are extremely active with chatter, but so is the more white hat forums. So this is all over the place right now.
Let’s start with WebmasterWorld, here are some of the comments:
There is a ton more there but you can visit those forums to see more.
Here are two different threads from the Black Hat World Forums – I am including select quotes but it does seem there is more activity in these forums:
Again, there is a lot more chatter but I cannot copy and paste it all here.
Let me include a bunch of posts on Twitter as well:
Now, like I said, the tools are pretty much not showing anything as a whole:
One More Thing… This Bill Lambert character on November 1st posted in the comments on this site saying “They want to do a rollback on Nov. 8.” This was related to BERT and maybe how it impacted the NY Times? But again, with the BERT release, I didn’t see this much chatter about an update at all – the chatter was small if any.
What are you seeing? This update seems very weird and again, Google has not confirmed it yet.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World Forums.
Update: Google somewhat confirmed it by saying they did several updates:
