I am seeing some chatter over the past few days of traffic and algorithm shifts within Google search. The issue is, it is the holiday break weekend and search volume is completely different this week and also the fact that most of Google is on vacation this week. So I doubt Google launched any algorithmic changes this week, during the holiday break.
Chatter began two days ago in this ongoing WebmasterWorld thread. Here are some of those comments:
Yesterday and today my organic traffic is well above normal. Freaky both by day and by holiday season.Something happening.
Me too...My total traffic has continued to decline straight through the holiday...now down by 2/3 since the 14th for no apparent reason at all.
US ecommerce, organic Google traffic is down 40%-50%.
Same here. Significant increase year over year and week over week.
The deal is, this week is really dead for most people. Most people I know are off or working less hours. So none of this is surprising.
John Mueller from Google responded to one such question, a webmaster blaming the mobile first index, which isn't live yet on the issue. John said:
@Neuromancer My guess those are normal fluctuations, independent of the mobile-first index experiments. Happy to look if you have a URL.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) December 29, 2016
Virtually all of the automated tracking tools show very little fluctuation in the search results in the past week or so. The last big change we covered was on December 15th.
So I think what webmasters are seeing are just normal holiday slowness.
What do you think, was there an update?
Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.
