I monitor several search results in the UK, Australia, and especially the Western Coast of the USA, or more specifically, attorneys on the West Coast (California, Washington, etc). I am seeing huge fluctuations in Google search results on October 23, 24, and so far on the 25th.

I went on over to the mozcast to see the “weather” and sure enough, Google is storming. Here’s an edited screenshot:

Big changes happening at Google on October 24 2016

Big changes happening at Google on October 24 2016

Spam pages filling up page one

Pages have come flying up out of nowhere onto page 1 from page 2 and 3 and beyond. I suspect that many of these pages were suffering from a Google Penguin penalty. Many in the SEO industry suspect that Penguin 4.0 does not penalize sites from bad links, and even takes existing penalties away. If that is the case, what is to stop people from blasting their site with poor quality links? If the bad links are discounted and a handful of links “stick” and improve the ranking, we are going to be looking at a massive amount of spam in the pages of Google search results.

Nothing good in the shakeup

Very powerful sites which used to dominate page 1 hit 1 have dropped to the bottom of page 1. People who had page 1 positions are now on page 2.

Yelp also seems to be a big winner in this update, rising above most organic results in a wide varierty of niches.

If you have noticed this shakeup please feel free to leave a comment below. Sometimes Google makes bad updates, hopefully this is one of them and it gets reversed.

Len
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On October 25, 2016   /   SEO News & Tips   /   Leave a comment

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