The folks at WebmasterWorld have started to spike in their chatter around a possible Google update starting this morning or yesterday.

Most of those noticing the changes are based in Germany, searching on Google.de.

So this may be a regional change or it may be the start of a larger update rolling out by Google. Or honestly, it may be nothing. But it seems like something. It seems like webmasters in that region have noticed several signs of an upcoming update including:

• Ranking changes
• Traffic referral changes from Google
• Crawl rate spikes by GoogleBot
• Cache dates in Google are sporadic

One senior member in Germany said:

Biggest drop today for several sites since 3 years now. We see a 25% drop in traffic. Conversions Zero.

It seems that there are two data centers that google is displaying now. One is very worse with lots of foreign sites and really rubbish ( maybe quality sites) sites that only put manufacturer information on the site, no design, very little html almost no navigation but lots of repeating keywords. Amazon rules for every single query, it makes no difference if the amazon page matches the query or not.

Another German SEO added:

I also see a quite big visibility drop yesterday for one of our content sites in Germany.

Mozcast showed some changes on Tuesday but hasn't updated yet for yesterday, SERP Metrics shows a spike for yesterday, and so does Algoroo for today.

Can this be the start of the Panda update - possibly, but way too early to tell at this point.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.