Webmaster chatter and industry case studies suggest these were separate events. According to our MozCast 10K tracking set, half of page-1 Google organic results were secure/HTTPs as of mid-April. Google claimed that the bulk of the indexing and canonicalization bug had been fixed by around October 14th. MozCast measured a drop in indexed pages and a temperature of 104°F around October 12th, with temperatures in the 90s lasting for a few days after.
Get technical support and product resources to bolster client success. In this work, we investigate this premise empirically and provide a strong case against it. Our researchers publish regularly in academic journals, release projects as open source, and apply research to Google products. We’re fostering a collaborative ecosystem with open-source tools, public datasets, and APIs that allow all of us to make the most of machine learning.
Google’s major local algorithm update, dubbed «Pigeon», expanded to the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The update was confirmed on the 22nd but may have rolled out as early as the 19th. Multiple SERP-trackers and many webmasters reported major flux in Google SERPs.
Nofollow helps clean up unvouched for links, including spammy blog comments. While not a traditional algorithm update, this change gradually has a significant impact on the link graph. After many reports of large-scale ranking changes, originally dubbed «Phantom 2», Google acknowledged a core algorithm change impacting «quality signals». This update seems to have had a broad impact, but Google didn’t reveal any specifics about the nature of the signals involved.
The monthly «Google Dance» finally came to an end with the «Fritz» update. Instead of completely overhauling the index on a roughly monthly basis, Google switched to an incremental approach. Google continued to crack-down on deceptive on-page tactics, including invisible text and META-tag stuffing. Some speculated that Google put the «Hilltop» algorithm into play and began to take page relevance seriously. A large-scale shuffle seemed to occur at the end of March and into early April, but the specifics were unclear.