14 DAY TRIAL // At the beginning of the month, webmasters took notice of some changes in the ranking of search results and everyone suspected that Google might have released another Panda upgrade in order to remove low quality content.
However, the search engine denied that any such upgrades had taken place. But since there were websites which had reported 85-90% decrease in organic traffic in their daily traffic, people did not hasten to take Google’s words for granted. They attributed the large fluctuations to Google penalization of irrelevant sites that distribute low-quality content.
Google denied any Panda update
However, after Search Engine Land insisted on the matter, Google felt obliged to reply, admitting to the fact that they had indeed performed some changes on "the core ranking algorithm in terms of how it processes quality signals."
In other words, it was not a Panda upgrade, as it had nothing to do with putting spammy websites at a disadvantage, but more like making some adjustments to the criteria they take into account when determining the quality of a site.
However, Google refused to disclose the factors that have been modified and what the recently revamped algorithm takes into consideration when assessing a site’s quality.
Furthermore, several webmasters have reported that they have experienced other issues as well, like unindexed pages or domains, which had them wondering if the update to the core algorithm might have anything to do with it. Google has not commented on this, either.
But not all websites have been affected in a negative way by the recent changes. On the contrary, there are quite a few which have registered an increase in organic traffic following the above-mentioned update.
This might be because with every page that lowers in the search ranking results, there is a better one, qualitatively speaking, that makes its way up.
One thing is certain: the update, dubbed The Quality Update by the guys from search Engine Land, was pretty impressive given the obvious changes in SERP, and the sites which have been downgraded in the ranking might have to work on improving their content.