Over the past week or so, Google has been getting some heat around various anti semitic and racist sites ranking well in their search results. One of those queries getting a ton of attention is [did the holocaust happen].

I am Jewish, but I am in a rare position to not personally have direct family who went through the Holocaust. Most of my friends had/have grandparents that did go through the Holocaust and I’ve spoken with them and saw the numbers burned into their arms. So I hate writing about this topic and honestly, I won’t.

I do want to point out that in Danny Sullivan’s latest story, Google sent him a comment that said they “recently made improvements to our algorithm.” Here is that comment:

But when was that? It seems to have happened before this controversy hit the media? I mean, it really hit around December 16th but we have tracked our last Google algorithm update as happening before December 15th.

So I am not sure when Google did this update. I don’t see any significant update between December 15th and now. Of course, the search results for [did the holocaust happen] are in major flux, but that seems to be mostly because all the news stories about it. A site like this or Search Engine Land may rank well for a week or so and then drop off because it is no longer newsy.

So now, I see denial sites ranking:

So again, did you see any algorithm update after the 15th? I really did not and the tools that track this, all except one, show no major fluctuations. Plus the metrics I follow to see if there was a Google update has no real signs of an update since December 15th.

I wonder if Google made any real change here or if it was limited to a really small set of queries related to these types of queries and sites?

Forum discussion at Twitter.