Google’s Matt Cutts had already announced a marathon Google algorithm update that would be implemented on a weekly basis over a period of around 3 weeks. Sites such as MozCast reported a huge jump in temperature in their Google Algorithm Weather Report followed by impressive peaks in the next few days too.
Analysts were confused and wondered if it was a glitch on the part of MozCast since a few other tools were not reporting such spikes. Since tests were done over multiple IP C-blocks there were hardly any chances of error in the data. The average daily MozCast temperature from June 25 to July 4 was 92.5 Degrees while the average during the period from May 28 to June 6 was 66.8 Degrees.
This indicates that maybe Google did initiate a few changes in the update, but rolled them back within a very short time. There was a drop on June 25 in the Partial Match Domain (PMD), which was quite early during the Google update. However, when viewed over a 30 day period, it seems that there was a recovery in PMDs on July 4. While there is a downward trend, the drop on June 25 does not look to be a permanent one. Interestingly, the downward trend seems to have started from the start of 2013.
EMDs also seem to indicate a similar downward trend, although within a tighter range based on the same year to date data. The data is based on 2 factors, which are PMDs/EMDs that are ranked in comparison to other domains and the number of PMDs/EMDs that are ranked through the data set. The data does indicate that around 60 percent of PMDs that had witnessed their rankings drop managed to make a recovery. However, several PMDs across various industry sectors failed to make a recovery.
In fact, there were a few PMDs that fell out of a single query that could suggest some sort of target action. MozCast also tracks the Top 10 websites that are prominent on a specific day. Since the start of 2013, the Top 10 gained around 2 ½ percentage points during the first half of the year. Some notable sites such as Twitter keep coming in and out of the list. With Google becoming stricter on spam, established websites usually have their names on the list.
However, the Top 10 sites too witnessed only a marginal change during the recent algorithm update during the period between June 25 and July 5. So, there does not seem to be any large change in the continuing updates by Google so far. The data suggests that Google may have implemented a big change only to revoke it later as it continues to test and refine the process.
Only the coming days will tell if there is a larger impact of these updates from Google and whether the update process is made much more transparent or opaque by Google.