Last week, news emerged in the SEO industry that the SEO community had noticed large fluctuations and changes in Google search results. The news has led to speculation that Google has introduced a new update, with many of the automated Google tracking tools such as Mozcast suggesting that a major Google algorithm update has been introduced.
When asked for comment, Google were quoted as saying that they were “as usual…continuing to make tweaks” to search results, but had no “specific update” to formally announce. Google went on to state that whatever changes that the community and the tools had spotted, it was unrelated to the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates.
Mass Mobile Warnings
There were suspicions that the changes may be in some way related to the mass mobile warning that were sent out earlier in January, regarding non-mobile friendly websites, however Search Engine Land were quick to suggest that this wasn’t the case.
Last month, Google sent mass notifications to webmasters with websites that are not mobile-friendly. The notifications were sent containing the subject “fix mobile usability issues found on…” before going on to explain that the sites have critical mobile usability errors on 100% of the pages on the site and that said pages would be “displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.”
Essentially the notifications were warning webmasters that their sites are not mobile-friendly and issued a warning that the pages won’t rank well in mobile search. Here is a copy of the email sent by Google:
Suggestions were made at the time that these changes were signs of a big change on the algorithm side, but the search engine giant are yet to announce any significant updates.
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