Google Algorithm change this month - theories ?

[Web-Incite]

I have seen a remarkable positive change this morning in rankings on one site which we have been trying to recover from an algorithmic penalty, however this appears to be an isolate result unique to Moz. Other tools show no such recovery in rankings for that site. Other similar sites we are tracking in Moz show no significant changes this morning.

[benjaminmarcinc]

I have noticed some major changes today too, i hope it stays lol.

[EGOL]

If I was going to guess, this is a topic-sensitive update.   Strengthening the rankings of sites that are all about something and demoting sites that are a little about everything.

Ebay has taken major hits in all of my SERPs.

Retail sites with substantive informative content are up with double listings.... showing product page and informative article about that topic displayed together in the SERPs.

[GPainter]

Thanks for the responses so far really great. Just a quick update Dr. Pete just mentioned the following - (attached)

Basically Moz cast just bottoms out at 40 degrees all time low!

xAjetrh

[19958]

I've noticed it too and Matt Cutts posted something on SSL on Twitter (he's talked about how he loves encryption before, but the timing is suspicious). Are your sites encrypted? Wondering if there's an update that responds well to encryption.

[MarieHaynes]

A lot of people are saying it's a test for a Penguin refresh, but none of the sites that I monitor for Penguin issues are showing any changes.  I spend a lot of time monitoring Twitter and SEO forums and here is what I am seeing:

-A lot of black hats are complaining that their sites are taking major hits.

-In the Google Webmaster Help forums there hasn't been an increase in people complaining that their sites are affected.

-A site that I monitor that gets affected both positively and negatively with many Panda updates is showing almost a 50% increase in organic traffic

So my conclusions?  I don't know.  

I feel like there may be a couple of things going on.  I think there is a Panda refresh as we haven't had one in a little while, but I also feel like Google is doing something new.

[Dr-Pete]

Posted some preliminary findings on Google+:

https://plus.google.com/b/112544075040456048636/+SEOmoz/posts/Tj2H3QDwX56

TLDR - definitely seeing unusual activity, and it doesn't seem to be a glitch. The last week we saw historic lows, so the contrast is very telling. It might be that Google kept changes light before rolling out something major.

I can confirm EGOL's observation that eBay took a big hit (also mentioned in the G+ post). This is unprecedented for a "Big 10" site, but it could well be temporary. An eBay-sized site moving in the SERPs that far could move the overall needle a bit, but I don't think it's the whole situation.

This feels more Penguin-like than Panda-like, but that's just my gut, and I think we have to be careful putting everything into those two buckets. With in the ballpark of 600 updates/year, there's a lot more than Panda and Penguin. If it's Penguin, we may yet hear confirmation from Google. If it's Panda, we probably won't.

[Dr-Pete]

I think the SSL thing is more Matt's personal crusade than a near-term change coming from Google, but it's hard to say. I suspect it's too early for that, personally.

[EGOL]

I've seen Ebay take this kind of hit in the past.  Then, after Google settled down, new auction pages began to appear.

I think that Google is playing with stale data because I see old versions of recently changed title tags.  With so many pages on ebay being ephemeral, I bet Google deleted them temporarily.  But, who knows what they are doing?

[Dr-Pete]

Our data on eBay can fluctuate a bit, since both the main domain and "popular.ebay.com" occupy a lot of real-estate, and seem to shuffle around. Historically, though, this is a big drop for a "Big 10" property.

[shaun_bd]

We saw some gains on Friday on a few terms that had fallen out of the top 50 quite a while ago.  This morning though we saw some major gains.    This is for an eCommerce site that was hit hard by the first panda update and also had a manual penalty for unnatural links (though the penalty was removed in late 2012).

[MarieHaynes]

Mystery solved.  Two major changes happened today:

1. Payday loans algo update - affects very spammy queries: http://searchengineland.com/official-google-payday-loan-algorithm-2-0-launched-targets-spammy-queries-192027 - This is what looked like Penguin but it wasn't Penguin.

2. A big Panda update - https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985.  Google doesn't usually announce Panda updates but I suppose if they affect enough queries it's worthy of announcing.

[GPainter]

Thanks Marie,

You can also read more about it on Dr.Pete's Moz post here-

http://moz.com/blog/panda-4-payday-loan-2-and-ebays-very-bad-day