Last week saw an animated discussion among SEOs about whether or not a Google algorithm update had occurred. This due to the fact that a number of SEOs said they had seen fluctuations in the sites monitored by them.
All of those questions and discussions were put to rest by this update from John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, during a live webmaster hangout on YouTube.
When quizzed about the update this was Mueller’s response:
“It wasn’t Penguin, but we do roll out a lot of updates over time, sometimes multiple updates… This isn’t the kind of update that we would announce. It wasn’t Penguin, so you can, I guess, cross that off your list. There are lots of different updates that we do, we make thousands of updates every year, and most of them we don’t give specific names. We don’t call out and announce each one.”
Clearly, a Penguin update did not happen. However, Google is constantly tweaking and updating its search algorithm. So there is every possibility that the fluctuations reported by multiple SEOs were merely due to Google testing or rolling out just another update.
For now the update which happened last week should just be considered as a routine move given the fact that the search giant has been rolling out search updates as and when it deems such an action necessary,
