I mentioned there was some chatter about a Google update on May 2nd but now we are seeing even more chatter and signs of flux in the Google search results on May 7th.

These signs of shifts in rankings, spikes in crawl rates, often, but not always, are early warning signs of a major Google update happening in the near future.

Here are flux/volatility charts from MozCast, SERPS.com, SearchMetrics and Algoroo:

All show similar patterns for the most part.

The chatter in the forums, including the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread follow these patterns also.

I did ask Matt Cutts if there was an update, but no response yet:

@mattcutts did you do an update on may 7th? :) — Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) May 8, 2014

I would not be surprised if Google launches something big soon on the algorithm side. It seems they are testing something big.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Google told us nothing is going on and there was no update.