Mozcast: 5th & 9th May - what's shaking up?

[Bondara]

What's going on at the moment, i can't find any info on the 5/9th May but Mozcast is showing some movement.

Anyone have any info?

Cheers

[Dr-Pete]

We saw the May 5 spike across multiple data centers, but we don't track a ton, so it's always tough to tell (our larger system was down for testing that day - it's not public yet). I feel like this is more than a test, though, and some relatively big changes are coming.

[Bondara]

Thanks Peter,

That's makes the situation clearer.

Do you think it could be small sample tests for something much larger? it seems strange we sore this flux then 2 week later Matt Cutts notified the world of there algo plans over the summer.

Then the next day this happens - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2268438/Google-Takes-Manual-Action-Against-Thousands-of-Link-Sellers

I get the feeling something large will happen soon.

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, had an email glitch in Q&A. I'm pretty confident there was some kind of update around 5/5-5/6, and I'm equally confident that it wasn't Pengun. Panda is in "everflux" now, so I don't expect we'll see any more typical Panda updates (although it's hard to say).

There were some change reported to local search, and Google also rolled out or at least tested a number of new features. My gut feeling right now is that there are a lot of small things going on that, collectively, had a sizable impact. Unfortunately, the data isn't very clear. Overall, though, I saw enough reports from webmasters, industry people, and other flux-tracking systems, that the volatility during this period seems real.

[MikeRoberts]

Best I can tell, its a lot of crazy speculation. I've seen comments and articles where people are stating its a Penguin refresh or their traffic is all over the place or pages that previously ranked position 3-10 dropped to 50 while ranks 1 & 2 stayed safe.

Looking at my own analytics data... just another normal week. We'll get more info as the days go on.

[KarlBantleman]

I've seen some people on a few forums say that they have seen huge drops in rankings! Now, some of these people were leaving comments and including links back to their websites so might not be anything major.....i hope!

[Bondara]

Uh ok, thanks for feedback.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Google won't confirm anything, and they gave their typical "we do 500 changes a year" response.