There are a nice number of SEOs and webmasters in the forums claiming they saw huge changes in terms of their rankings in Google starting on November 22nd or so. Since it was Thanksgiving day and traffic is always off on holidays, I wanted to wait it out. But there are many claims of an update, possibly a reversal of the Medic Update for some that were originally hit on August 1st.
Here is some of the chatter from both WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World around the changes in the Google search results:
Most of the tracking tools show no real fluctuations around Thanksgiving, which also implies that it was just a slow down in holiday traffic. But it is also a time when online shopping is huge, so who knows.
Accuranker showed changes:
The rest were pretty calm and not showing much in terms of changes with Google.
So what happened? Was there an algorithm update? Was it just normal slow holiday traffic? I think it was a combination of all of this. I suspect some sites can possibly see recoveries to previous updates. But also the holiday days really makes it hard for me to measure the chatter in the forums.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
Update: Ill add some tweets from people who saw changes:
