The past few days have caused widespread discussions in the SEO industry regarding changes to search engine results and a suspected Google Algorithm Update. Google are not yet calling it a full scale update and have commented saying “as usual, we're continuing to make tweaks, but we don't have a specific "update" to announce." They have however confirmed that the update is not related to Panda or Penguin.
As we investigate the changes in the search engine results we can see the fluctuations on 4th and 5th February.
So what exactly has happened? The first change seems to be based around misspellings of brands. Before these changes typo searches such as ‘Adiddas’ produced top 10 search results comprising of mainly of price comparison sites and small ad pages but now the same typo search sees Adidas’ official site ranked first, illustrating a huge gain for big name companies from this algorithm change. Searchmetrics ran some analysis on the term ‘Adiddas’ – You can see how the top 10 results have increased around 99 positions whereas the rankings for the misspelling the week before were dominated by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram results.
It’s not all good news for big retailers, however, as the second area that seems to have been affecting being rankings for smaller ecommerce sites. For correct brand searches, these algorithm changes seem to have caused smaller providers to gain positions, while some bigger domains lose out. These changes are still occurring though meaning that further fluctuations in search engine results are likely to take place before Google settles the results!
Speculation is also set around mobile sites following a warnings about mobile sites and their usability sent out by Google a few days before these “tweaks” happened however some non-mobile optimised sites have gained positions and some responsive and mobile sites have lost out; leading us to believe the two incidents are not related.
If your site has been affected by this Google algorithm change, or if you simply want to learn more about our SEO services, get in touch with Ascensor today!