Google has been moving away from occasional big updates to more frequent smaller updates for a while. So it’s becoming increasingly rare to see a large named update. However there have been a larger than usual number of webmasters reporting large traffic drops in the last 1 - 2 weeks.
Over at SERoundtable Barry Schwartz has reported having a number of webmasters contact him with similar stories. Looking through the complaints on the Google Webmaster forums myself, whilst some appear easily explainable, others not so much.
Many of the sites reporting traffic drops rely on ad revenue, but this doesn’t apply to all of them. I’ve also seen a few that have possible geo location issues or have recently updated their geo settings within the search console.
My feeling is that this is a couple of different updates which have happened close together and so a broader range of sites has been affected. Google has been typically non-committal on the issue, neither confirming or denying (no surprise there).
So if your site has been affected please do let us know in the comments. Especially as it doesn’t look as though we’re going to find out what’s going on from Google.
