Late Friday, Matt Cutts, Google’s distinguished engineer, reported through Twitter that the company has rolled out a small algorithm change to improve domain diversity for some searches. While Cutts didn’t offer marketers insights on the number of searches impacted, the small shift is the first from Google this month.
For marketers that dominated SERPs for core terms, the change could reduce their SEO visibility, as the change could give other websites a chance to show up for these terms. Conversely, organizations with effective SEO may see improvements in ranking for highly competitive terms and win more organic search traffic from Google.
If Google continues its algo update trends, marketers might expect a minor Panda update toward the end of the month. Brafton highlighted the most recent Panda update in late August. Panda 3.9.1 affected about 1 percent of all queries
Meanwhile, marketers anticipate a larger adjustment related to Google’s Penguin algorithm on the horizon. At SES San Francisco last month, Cutts said that it’s unlikely that Panda tweaks will result in the large-scale changes experienced during earlier iterations – but Penguin updates could shake up SEO.
