I am seeing signs of a possible Google search ranking update that kicked off late Friday, May 6th and has really spiked this morning - May 8th - also Mother's Day in many regions. There is both a lot of chatter in the SEO forums and many of the tools are showing volatility in the Google search results rankings.
I do try not to post on the weekend but this morning the signals I track around these updates really spiked - so I figured I'd do a special weekend and Mother's Day story about this update.
The last update we reported on also went unconfirmed, the May 1st update. Things calmed down a bit since May 1st but again, the Google search results started to spike a couple of days ago.
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the chatter from SEOs about this possible Google update from both WebmasterWorld and some comments here.
Things simply do not "feel" right this month however my "feelings" do not agree with my traffic:1-5 May 115.3% 6 May so far 50.7% with 12 hours remaining of my Googleday
Noticeably my traffic this month is well ahead from India and down from the USA. I always get quantity traffic from India since we're a 50-year-old Anglo-Indian company plus India is one of the top 3 global sources for my widgets.
Same here. Yesterday normal, today 58% down so far.
My USA traffic also way down today... down 45% at 11:30am. Check your stats for previous Fridays. I am seeing this huge drop in USA traffic every single Friday like clockwork. Meanwhile plenty of Peru, Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, Iran, etc...
Another big drop at around ~1 AM GMT, all my sites affected, not just the usual suspect (the much tormented senior site).
Interestingly, I previously reported a whole bunch of traffic in the early hours of the morning, which was unexpected. Since then, I've had no traffic - none at all, which is even more surprising since the majority of the UK is now up and awake.
I'm experiencing a lot of the same, particularly very unnatural traffic patterns. Through the week, where I would expect to get consistent visitors, there's been hours and hours of nothingness. Today - a Sunday - I've had loads of traffic in the early hours. What's that all about?! No conversions on the back of it though. Now, on some days, up to 40% of my traffic comes from other search engines.
So that is some of the chatter from over the weekend from within the SEO community.
Google Tracking Tools
The Google search tracking have also started to notice big changes in the Google search results. Here are screenshots from the tools as of this morning.
So there does seem to be some sort of Google update going on this Mother's Day weekend. Have you noticed any changes yourself?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: A lot of chatter on this continues into Monday - more in the forums and a lot on Twitter and the comments below.
Glenn also shared these charts:
And here are two examples of keywords the site dropped for. The site ranked #1 for both of these keywords & completely fell off a cliff. Again, this site had some reviews content that seemed to be impacted over the past few days (but it's more than that...) Just a heads-up. pic.twitter.com/Yoy6lmGM6Z
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 9, 2022
