News Courtesy of SearchEngineLand.com:
There was some chatter and rumors of an update that touched down on September 27th. So if you saw your rankings and Google traffic change this week, it might be related to this “smaller” update.
What happened? Google routinely updates its search ranking algorithms to provide the most relevant and useful search results. Sometimes those updates impact a larger percentage of sites and sometimes they impact a smaller percent of sites. This algorithmic update was on the smaller scale, according to Google.
Ryan’s Take 
There was nothing out of the ordinary that I noticed this week for my own website rankings. I know that some website owners and administrators are still reeling from the medic update that occurred about a month ago. I would expect that Google wouldn’t roll out any more major changes for at least another month or so. They seem to be focused on cosmetic changes at the moment.
Google’s stance on recent algorithm changes seems to emphasize a bonus for “under-rewarded” websites rather than penalties for higher-ranking sites. This supports my belief that they are shying away from penalties and focusing on devaluing questionable SEO tactics.
I think Google realizes how hurtful negative SEO has become. In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for websites that had hundreds of spammy backlinks to be penalized. Now backlinks such as those should have very little value or none at all. I believe that the same logic can be applied to articles with links that are contained in spun content posts. Yes, some SEO’s will use spun content to try and gain an advantage. However, due to the poor quality, it would be just as easy to perform a negative SEO attack with low-quality articles.
As always, if you notice a drop in rankings, the first thing you should do is an on-site audit. Did you lose any prominent backlinks? Did you change your strategy for content creation? As long as you are writing solid content with proper SEO structure, there is no reason your rankings should dramatically drop.
