Webmasters in a discussion
forum have noticed changes in Google's search results. Do we have to expect a larger ranking algorithm update? How will this influence the ranking of your web pages in Google's search results?
What changes did webmasters notice in Google's search results? Not all webmasters noticed the same changes. Here's an overview of what has been reported:
- Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google's index early March.
- It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
- Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
- The Cache data doesn't seem to be updated.
- The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.
Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.
Is this really a ranking algorithm update? Google engineer Matt Cutts denied that there are any major changes in the search results and that there was a ranking algorithm update on the way.
However, he wanted to investigate if and why the results change so much.
The observations of the webmasters in the forum might be normal changes that happen all the time. But the webmasters who discovered the changes are very web-savvy and they should be able to distinguish an anomaly from usual fluctuations.
What does this mean to your Google rankings? It has yet to turn out whether this really is a ranking algorithm or not. If your rankings haven't changed yet, there's no need to act. The whole thing might just be a temporary hiccup.
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