Was There a Small Google Update on the 8th April 2015?

There seems to have been a small Google Update around the 8th April 2015 that has mostly gone unnoticed by the wider SEO community, probably in part due to the Easter Break and natural reduction in web traffic during this time.

Furthermore, the SERP tracking tools do not seem to show anything major happening but having looked into some metrics there does appear to be something afoot.

Google SERPs Rank Tracking Tools

Let us first take a look at the Google Weather to see how significant the changes have been in the SERPs with this small update.

MozCast:

The last result in this chart is the 7th April and shows the MozCast weather at 70 percent. This is not that significant, and it is easy to see why this update has not been noticed.

Let us check Algaroo:

As you can see from this chart, the changes in the SERPs are relatively minor over the last few days, so you may starting to doubt that something significant happened. Thankfully, we will get to what changes we have noticed next.

MozCast Metrics

MozCast is based upon data collected by Moz.com, which aims to track various “weather patterns” in the Google search. Whilst this is useful for major updates, they also track other data that can track things such as:

• Domain Diversity — This measures the percentage of unique domains in the SERP results. The lower the figure here, and the more you will see websites have multiple results in the search decreasing the overall diversity of domains in the results.
• SERP Count — There has been an increasing trend for Google to show fewer results on the first page of Google. This typically varies between 8 and nine results, but some search terms have been as low as 4 or 5 results, again restricting organic results from showing on the first page.
• EMD Influence — This metric indicates the influence of Exact Match Domains showing in the search results. This is significant, as, before the EMD Update a few years ago, this was a very popular way of increasing the chance of ranking highly in Google.
• PMD Influence — This metric shows the influence of Partial Match Domains showing in the search results.
• Daily Big 10 — Moz tracks the percentage of results being held by one of the top domains, such as wikipedia.org, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

So let us take a look at the changes for the 7th April and see if something is going on.

Domain Diversity:

SERP Count

EMD Influence

PMD Influence

Daily Big 10

Final Thoughts

As you can see, all the metrics points to something fairly significant happening, even though it doesn’t appear to be affecting a very large number of websites looking at the SERP tracking tools.

No one has picked up anything over at Webmasterworld, although some mention is made to some movement the previous Friday (Good Friday). Other SEO blogs \ websites are mostly quiet on the issue.