Will Columbus Day be the next Major Update?

[artistnos]

Does anyone have hold the same opinion as me ... that Google favour the Weekends which fall near Bank & Public Holidays for their Major Updates ?

In the past I have recorded the beginning of these changes taking place on the Thursday before the Bank Holiday Weekends and finalising on the Sundays.

I hope that I'm wrong because I think the next big day is Columbus Day on October the 13th :-(

All the Best

Col :-)

[tedster]

I've also noticed something like this patterns, but there's really no predicting Google.

[artistnos]

Hey ... Y'mean I'm not going mad. With all of the data I've been chewing over I'd thought I'd lost it completely ;-)

Could it really be as loose as that ? It's not as though these dates are regularly spaced apart and easy to plan for. I've certainly seen this pattern on Christmas, New Years and Easter, and the last two years have definately thrown some wobbly bowls our way (i.e. just before the holiday sales season).

All the Best

Col :-)

[artistnos]

I've spent some of today chatting with other interested parties and there seems to be a small consensus of opinion that although Google may be doing tests over the bank holidays, they don't seem to have a policy of roll out over these periods.

We also concluded that most damage is caused by the rush to update their cache before these dates and the ripples of effect that are felt by "Google Test + New Page Cache = Widespread Page Rank & Trust Breakdown".

In conclusion I think that I will be looking hard at my calendar and not planning any page updates within 10 days of any public holidays. Call me paranoid ... but in a strange way it makes sense to me ;-)

All the Best

Col :-)

[HuskyPup]

The US seems to have a lot of public holidays to me!

What do you average, one per month?

[artistnos]

Hi HuskyPup,

Surprisingly few over here in UK ...

New Year's Day 1 Jan
Easter - Good Friday 21 Mar & Easter Monday 24 Mar
Early May Bank Holiday 5 May
Spring Bank Holiday 26 May
Summer Bank Holiday 25 Aug
Christmas Day 25 Dec & Boxing Day 26 Dec

USA have slightly more I think.

All the Best

Col :-)

[HuskyPup]

Surprisingly few over here in UK ...

I know, I'm in the UK:-)

By the way your dates are wrong for some of them next year...lol

[jimbeetle]

Columbus Day is not really a major holiday here in the States. Yeah, it's observed in some places, kind of, under different names depending on where you live. The feds and fed-chartered banks are closed, some state govs and some city offices. But for most folks it's just another Monday morning came too soon day at work.

So no, I don't think it's the type of comparatively low Internet usage period where G does quite often appear to test, roll out or whatever.

[artistnos]

Hi jimbeetle,

I was just thinking that over the past 4 years that I've been tracking sites for clients, I've seen serious 'anti-commercial' activity around this time. By this I mean that non paying, but high ranked commercial / affiliate sites seem to lose position at the end of October which usually causes a big rumpus on the industry blogs, chats etc.

Hey Husky,

My dates are always wrong ... I'm seriously out there when it comes to reality ;-)

All the Best

Col :-)

[artistnos]

Some changes were being noticed on Thursday

[MLHmptn]

Honestly I don't really think Google has major updates now....Rather they have these mini-updates bi-weekly or so it seems....When was the last major update? I can't even remember.

[tedster]

I'd say you're exactly right - Google now has infrastructure that allows nearly continual changes, shifts, new factor integration, and so on. I'd guess that they don't need or want major one-point updates and the disruptions that used to follow from them.

The last major update was really Jagger [webmasterworld.com] in 2005 - and that was to prepare the way for migrating to the Big Daddy infrastructure in early 2006. The Big Daddy migration itself was a several month process that some people called an update, but it was quite a unique event, very unlike dropping in a new index all at once. And since then, it's been small changes and sometimes slightly larger changes, but nothing like the old major updates.

More recently we've seen some noticable changes that we called updates, such as Buffy [webmasterworld.com] and Dewey [webmasterworld.com], and other changes that seemed to focus on certain markets or certain practices, such as link selling. So certain types of sites would feel the sting of the update, but not the entire web.

As I mentioned, these more recent "updates" were pretty pale compared to something like Florida [webmasterworld.com] in 2003, the last of the old-style updates [webmasterworld.com] that heralded the beginning of continual PR processing - and in recent years, "updates" are now always surrounded by continued juggling and jiggling of the SERPs.