Both Google and Yahoo! have decided to provide website owners with a "holiday season treat" by updating their respective search results (SERPs) - simultaneously!

Both the major search engines have been executing some algorithm changes causing the usual ranking turmoil for webmasters and site owners over the last week.

While Google has made no formal announcement, the subtle mention of some tweaks associated to the new site links enhancement "twice the sitelinks" might have been the clue.

Site owners have been sharing mixed stories in the forums, with one reporting his listing dropped from being ranked 19th to outside 1000 - overnight. Others are suggesting their listings have been up and down in a matter of days. Here's a couple of the other comments at webmasterworld:

"...My biggest site has been jumping from SERP#1 to SERP#-16-20 and back several times..."

"...my ranking is fluctating and in whole there is loss in visitors..."

Yahoo! on the other hand announced the changes with the release of its X-Robots-Tag support. According to their post:

"...we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process."

At this critical time of year for most online businesses, these index and ranking updates will be an unwelcome surprise. Have you seen your rankings change over the last week? - if so, share your experiences.

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