Evidence Of An Unconfirmed Google Update Happening On November 19th

November 19, 2015 there were unconfirmed reports of a Google search ranking update. Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google has nothing to announce and Google makes hundreds of changes per year.

Truth is, if it was Google Panda or Google Penguin related, John Mueller of Google probably would have told us. But when it comes to their core search ranking algorithm, like one we saw in May 2015, Google said they would not confirm such updates.

While there was plenty of evidence, case studies and chatter within the industry on November 20th, the day after this unconfirmed update, we now have more stories coming out around this update.

Many are calling this the Phantom III update because the code name for the May update was Phantom II.

Analysis and Findings From the November 19, 2015 Google Algorithm Update (Including Its Connection With Phantom 2) by Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive and Phantom Update III: What Google’s updated Quality Guidelines could mean for page rankings by Marcus Tober of SearchMetrics both provide incredible detail into sites that were impacted, how they were impacted and theories on why they were impacted.

In short, it seems like this update was around quality and how Google measures the quality of your web site.

While Marcus Tober feels this is associated with the release of Google’s quality rater guidelines document, where Marcus said “sites that adhere to these guidelines seem to be safer from ranking losses,” others do not necessarily agree. Google themselves said the guidelines do not dictate the rankings plus these guidelines are not new. But yes, quality sites should rank well and their algorithms are adjusted over time to ensure that.

Glenn Gabe feels this is related to quality, specifically at looking at your site from a “key user engagement” view and improving on that would make for a better quality web site and higher rankings.

Both are correct, but the key here is that there is plenty of evidence to show that Google did do an update to their core ranking algorithm on November 19th that they did not confirm – similar to the May 1st update.

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