Mediaboss Marketing

Once again, webmasters are complaining about what may have been a major update from Google. Theyve taken to the Google Webmaster Help forums to express their grievances, although to be fair, its not all bad for everybody. When sites drop, others rise. Thats how it works.

Barry Schwartz, at Search Engine Roundtable, who wonders if it could be the overly SEO penalty Matt Cutts discussed at SXSW last month, points to 11 separate forum threads with complaints. Theres definitely something going on.

Of course, in these situations, the Panda update is always mentioned. Weve reached out to Google for more info. Sometimes they respond. Sometimes they dont. It will most likely be one of the generic we make changes every day kind of responses, and well probably have to wait until the end of April or the beginning of May to get the real list of changes Google has made.

The last time there was a known Panda update, Google went so far as to tweet about it. They know people want to know when this happens. That doesnt necessarily mean theyll tweet every time, but I wouldnt be surprised. This time, no tweet from Google so far.

For a refresher on the overly SEO penalty Schwartz speaks of, read the following:

Google Is Working On Making SEO Matter Less Google Webmaster Central Creator Talks Googles New Google Changes New Google Changes: Really A Matter Of Mom And Pop? SEO DOs And DONTS According To Google: Mixed Signals?

Other things have been costing sites lately. For one, Googles de-indexing of paid blog/link networks caused a lot of webmasters to get messages from Google about questionable links. This week, Google sent out messages to 20,000 sites informing them that they appeared to be hacked.

If youre rankings have fallen, one thing you may want to consider is taking authorship more seriously (and that includes Google+ engagement), though even that appears to be having some issues on the tracking side.

Last week, we spoke with Dani Horowitz whose site, DaniWeb, has been hit by Google, yet again, after recovering from multiple iterations of the Panda update.

Not only does Google make changes every day, it runs even more experiments, with subsets of users. Matt Cutts recently talked about how Google runs 20,000 search experiments a year.

The rest is here:
Major Google Update Suspected, Yet Again, By A Bunch Of Webmasters