Any more info on potential Google algo update from April 24th/25th?

[thatkinson]

Apart from an article on Search Engine Roundtable, I haven’t been able to find anything out about the potential algorithm update that happened on Monday / Tuesday of this week. One of our sites (finance niche) saw drops in rankings for bad credit terms on Tuesday, followed by total collapse on Wednesday and Thursday. We had made some changes the previous week to the bad credit section of the site, but the curious thing here is that rankings for bad credit terms all over the site (not just the changed section) disappeared. Has anyone else seen the impact of this change, and are there any working theories on what caused it? I’m even wondering whether a specific change has been made for bad credit terms (i.e. the payday loan update)?

[Dr-Pete]

Honestly, we've seen such high flux in April -- including that week -- that it's really hard to pull anything useful apart. We have no confirmation of an algorithmic event (other than the usual "There are events every day" line).

There was talk last week about "Project Owl" -- Google's multi-pronged attack on fake news, but it appears that only a part of that is algorithmic, and that part has been rolling out over the past couple of months. I don't think the flux from the week in question is related to Owl.

Hopefully, someone in the community has some more insight on the vertical-specific data you're seeing.