Google "Core" Update Sends Online SERP Volatility Tools Spiking!

Early in June, Barry Schwartz reported on some chatter he was seeing regarding a possible update by Google. This chatter coincided with an extremely noticeable temperature spike on MozCast, which seeks to track volatility in the search results.

It was believed at the time that this update was either Panda (which was announced as pending at SMX Advanced) or possibly related to HTTPS changes Google had made earlier. The thought being that they were increasing the HTTPS ranking signal. Google came out soon after denying this was HTTPS related in a tweet from engineer Gary Illyes. They then debunked a Panda refresh with the following statement:

"This is not a Panda update. As you know, we're always making improvements to our search algorithms and the web is constantly evolving. We're going to continue to work on improvements across the board."

The possibility of this update being Penguin related has also been dismissed since Google reported at SMX Advanced any such update was still months away.

So what was it?!

Unfortunately, we have no idea and Google does make these type of changes to their algorithm regularly.

What we can confirm is that the update did benefit magazine and news sites noticeably. Marcus Tober at SearchMetrics put together some great data that shows the biggest gainers post-update were large well-known media sites like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Daily Mail, Time, TechCrunch and many others.

And here's another perspective that says media sites didn't receive any noticeable boost but instead provides possible evidence to support an increase in the HTTPS signal even though it was denied as such by Google.