Google has confirmed today that it made a “small” algorithm update to its search ranking system this past week.
Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter “We haven’t had a major update of that nature, but we did have a smaller one this week.”
Here is the tweet:
There was some chatter and rumors of an update that touched down on September 27th. So if you saw your rankings and Google traffic change this week, it might be related to this “smaller” update.
What happened? Google routinely updates its search ranking algorithms to provide the most relevant and useful search results. Sometimes those updates impact a larger percentage of sites and sometimes they impact a smaller percent of sites. This algorithmic update was on the smaller scale, according to Google.
Who was impacted? That is still unclear. Google did not say who or what types of sites were impacted. Google just said it did a smaller update this week and did not provide additional clarity.
What should I do? If your rankings didn’t change and you traffic is stable, then do nothing. Just keep doing what you are doing. If you took a hit and your rankings suffered, then previous Google advice has been to just keep working on making your site better. Google’s previous advice was:
What are algorithm updates? Google algorithm updates are when Google releases new changes to how it ranks websites in the search results. As explained above, sometimes these updates can impact more or fewer sites. We have covered a lot of algorithm updates. To learn more, see our Google algorithm updates section of coverage.
