Google Rankings are anything but stable, they have been downright lively. The rankings seem to be able to jump multiple places forwards and backwards within the time it takes you to refresh the page. It is not out of place to see ranking shifts across different Google Data centers but to watch them move in real time in the same data center is just crazy. Either this is one update that went bad or Google finally broke the mold and made their algo’s to rank dynamically on the fly (I doubt this very seriously). What makes this so funny is it is like a previous update earlier this year: GOOGLE DID NOT TELL US THEY WERE DOING IT!

In the past Google updates were always made known early by Matt Cutts (spokesman for Google) on his Blog. Where he inquires comments from SEO’s on what we see changing after an update. Yet for some reason no word has yet been said about this mysterious index shifting by Matt or anyone else at Google. Matt Cutts didn’t inform us of a previous update in the beginning of the year because he himself, I guess, hadn’t even heard about it. So why is Google now trying to be secretive all of a sudden?

Many webmasters and SEO’s are wondering what they are up to and relying on forums to communicate with each other to try to puzzle out Google’s gauntlet of an algorithm. One post at webmasterworld.com read this:

“The fun is over. It seems to have finally happened. Do no evil (GOOGLE) has finally given in to the dark side.

- SEO has been directly attacked with most black hat filters being lifted just to complicate things even more.
- Commercial sites are being devalued so they have to buy Adwords.
- Google has monopolised PPC with their Yahoo “purchase” (let’s be honest, this was the only way they could take over Yahoo without getting into trouble with anti-competition laws).
- Results are being rotated so that people give up trying SEO and buy Adwords.
- Results are being rotated to confuse users so that they look harder on the page and hopefully run into more adverts. (opinions?)

Google is no longer part of the online user experience, they have positioned themselves as the only choice and turned off the usability. They are making Microsoft look almost friendly. They got to the top by making us like them and providing relevant results and now the sheep costume has been thrown off … “ Read the rest of the posts here…

Is Google really removing a Sheep costume? Have they got an update gone bad? Have they implemented the first ever dynamically changing on the fly results? Do they just randomly rotate them back and forth? Are they removing spam filters so that the spammy sites move to the top so we will report them as spam, effectively doing their work for them? Time will tell, all I can say for sure, is that our clients are jumping all over the place but over all they are jumping ahead. In Overview if you keep your search engine optimization practices clean in the long run you will pull out ahead.