Did Google’s Indexing Issue Hide a Secret Ranking Update?

Almost a month ago we wrote about a major Google indexing issue that prevented thousands of new pages from being included in Google search results. Mostly impacting blogs, the Google bug prevented new content from being indexed across a whole range of sites including our own blog and major sites like cnn.com.

Shortly after reporting the issue, a Google representative stepped in and confirmed they were experiencing a problem. On October 25, Google reported that the issue had been fixed, stating that content from the 19th-24th October would be reindexed again shortly.

After further investigation of the issue there is a possibility that Google made a tweak to their ranking algorithms around this time. According to a blog post on Alexa, sometime around October 21st, they noticed a change in traffic for a number of websites. A quote and screenshot from the post can be seen below:

There’s also a 14 page discussion on Webmaster World with a number of other users also seeing changes in their rankings and Google traffic. There have been discussions around the impact on long tail keywords, but it’s tough to confirm the exact nature of this update.

Source: ineedhits.com