algorithm-updates

Update 2/8/17: We are now a full month into the rollout of the mobile popup algorithm and I am still not seeing widespread impact. I did surface a few examples of urls being impact during the first week of the rollout, but there are still many sites employing mobile popups or interstitials that have not been … Read more

Summary: Yes, it’s happening again. There was a significant Google algorithm update on 11/30/16, following an update on 11/10/16 that was partially reversed on 11/18/16. And the 11/30 update is showing a connection to previous quality updates (AKA Phantom). Let’s explore what’s going on in Google Land. When writing about the November 10, 2016 Google … Read more

{Update: Saturday, November 19, 2016 – I saw reversals starting yesterday, November 18 (both recoveries and drops), which supports my theory that this was the mobile-first index being tested. I have provided more information below at the end of this post about what I’m seeing — including screenshots.} The fall of 2016 has been one of the … Read more

{Updated on 7/4/16 with additional information and screenshots based on the impact from the June algorithm update.} {Updated on 7/6/16 with  information about the gain or loss of rich snippets based on the June update.} {Updated on 7/11/16 with information about Penguin 4.0 from Google’s John Mueller.} Summer is here, and it could be a … Read more

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Well for SEOs, it’s slightly different this year. March came in like lion and went out like a bigger lion. There were three distinct dates where I saw significant movement from an algorithm update standpoint (starting on 3/3, then more on … Read more

A funny thing happened as I was finishing my last blog post about Google’s unconfirmed algorithm updates in 2015. I was getting ready to publish the post and the algo Richter scale in my office started to move – and move quickly. So I held off on publishing the post and waited for more data … Read more

2015 has been an incredibly interesting year from a Google algorithm update standpoint. Although there weren’t many confirmed updates like previous years, it was still a relatively volatile year algo-wise. We had the mobile-friendly algorithm released in April of 2015, Phantom 2 confirmed in early May, and then Panda 4.2 in July. Although those are … Read more

In my last post, I explained what I have seen during the extended rollout of Panda 4.2. I ended up analyzing over seven weeks of Panda data, since P4.2 is going through an extended rollout. And yes, it’s still rolling out now. More about that soon. Overall, it had been very quiet leading up to … Read more

Note: I reached out to Google last week to learn more about the current rollout of Panda 4.2, when it would be completed, and other interesting questions I had based on my analysis. But I haven’t heard anything back directly related to those questions. I will update this post if I receive more information about … Read more

As many of you know, Phantom 2 began rolling out on April 29, 2015, just days after the mobile-friendly update was released. Phantom 2 was a big update that Google initially denied. During my analysis of the update, I saw a lot of movement across sites dealing with content quality problems. It was clear from … Read more

Panda can be devastating. We all know that’s the case and it’s been documented to the nth degree since February of 2011. And now we have Phantom (AKA “The Quality Update”), which was a change to Google’s core ranking algorithm regarding how it assesses “quality”. Between the two, you can clearly see that Google is … Read more