Over the past 36 hours or so, I’ve been tracking a level of chatter in the industry around a possible Google update. Some are telling me they are seeing huge changes in their rankings and traffic from Google. Others are saying spammers have returned to the Google search results. Either way, I am getting this from forum threads, tweets and detailed emails with charts of traffic changes. So something is going on.

I will say, the levels of chatter are not that of a Penguin refresh or even Panda update.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he has nothing to announce, it might just be the 100s of changes they make to their search results every year. So clearly he is not aware of any search quality update that happened, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a core search change in Google.

The monitoring tools, some, not all, show changes as well:

MozCast spiked:

RankRanger shows movement:

Advanced Web Ranking:

SERP Metrics also:

SERPs.com and Algoroo do not show much change. So it might have just hit certain queries or specific types of sites.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has some chatter:

I’m seeing a lot of change here in the UK too. Links are king; bought or otherwise (mainly bought).

It goes on and on with the chatter. Of course, this might be Panda slowly continuing to roll out? But I doubt it – I mean, I doubt it is related to the slow Panda roll out, I do think Panda is still slowly rolling out nevertheless.

Here is one of many tweets:

Do you see any changes?

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.