Google confirms algorithm update responsible for major changes in SERPS

If you noticed that your search engine ranking positions on Google fluctuated mid-December – or perhaps lost a host of positions across a range of keywords – you aren’t alone. The search engine has just confirmed that it updated its algorithm in mid-December and the result has been significant changes to positions for many websites.

A spokesman for the search engine, said that it had made several ‘minor’ improvements and adjustments as part of its regular maintenance efforts in order to continue to better the relevance of its results.

Analysist have said the pre-Christmas update (which one prominent industry analyst has dubbed the Maccabees update) focused primarily on mobile. The resulting volatility has spiked across a number of categories at difference times including automotive and law first in the USA on 19 ^th December and in several European countries including the UK the following day. A second major spike in changes is said to have specifically affected sites in the internet and tech sector, hobbies and leisure, homes and gardens, jobs and education and science.

In addition to the biggest changes being felt on mobile, some observers have theorised that the sites that have undergone a dramatic loss of search engine results visibility were penalised for not using schema markup. The experts at Searchmetrics say that they have observed many sites without schema.org integration losing rankings.

Sites using doorway pages – which are pages created to rank highly for a specific keyword or search query – were also hit hard. Google is known to dislike doorway pages because they can lead to multiple very similar pages being indexed, making it difficult for the user to find what they are actually searching for.

Google itself has not commented on what the specific updates or changes it has made to its algorithm as part of its routine changes. The search engine is notoriously tight lipped when it comes to dishing out details but, is always thought to avoid major changes in December so as to avoid creating a tidal wave of problems for businesses around the busy Christmas trading period.

While a lot of industry experts are unsure exactly what is going on, many of said that they want to undertake a more specific and detailed look at the data to understand what the systematic changes are. If your app development agency site has a Google ranking, now would be a good time to run an audit, check your real search engine positions and if you find your rankings have been hit, devise a plan of action to minimise damage.