We are seeing big volatility again in the Google Search results as of yesterday and today, which might be the tail-end of the November 2021 Google core update. Yep, talk about timing - the Black Friday shopping is in high gear today and tomorrow. And yes, we know these core updates take about one to two weeks to fully rollout, and Google has not yet confirmed it is done rolling out. Can these tremors be unrelated to the core updates? Sure - anything is possible. But this is an update to the early big changes we saw the first 48 hours of this rollout.
The tools are pretty much all showing high volatility - some started to show the changes yesterday, on November 24th and now most are showing a spike in changes in Google's search results today, November 25th on Thanksgiving Day.
SEO Chatter
There is also a lot of chatter around these changes for a Thanksgiving week. Here is some of that chatter from WebmasterWorld:
Tuesday's traffic was 97% with US PVs significantly lower however I assume this is simply the Thanksgiving holiday plus, as expected, today is even quieter.For me overall November is tracking to be the lowest month of the year with December always being the quietest.
47% drop in USA traffic today...some of my main landing pages are down 29%-45%. Search is off by 8% in total and direct is off by 17%, while referral traffic is down 75%. If this is just the holiday talking it's a huge drop this year.
Feels to me like things are still rolling out? Weird traffic patterns today in real-time.
Obviously rolling out. There was second wave, started exactly 7 days after first wave. And its effect is more of the same.
Our traffic is down slightly yesterday compared to the previous weeks but that is not surprising as it always is (along with today) since it is the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.Still this past year we have lost about 35% of our traffic which I was hoping would be fixed with this core update.
Here are some of what people are sharing on Twitter:
I'm seeing recovery from the first movement.
— Mike (@Purchases) November 24, 2021
Lot of indexed "search" results showing on some big KWs I target.
Not full recovery, just back up slightly. I didn't see many new sites come into the rankings either.
— Mike (@Purchases) November 24, 2021
Mostly just big niche authority sites with their random tag or search pages taking the top spots. this will more than likely change in the next week. Happened before.
What goes up must come down... 😰 pic.twitter.com/xL6Gjio2bW
— Christian Radny (@ChrisRadny) November 25, 2021
Yup I've monitored this reversed trend. A big part of targeting KWs were lose the visibility from several accounts and now they're coming back to where it were before the update.. But the best part is I didn't see much change in the traffic and am happy for that 😎
— Syed Bilal Ahmed (@Billymovhic) November 24, 2021
Saw a big increase yesterday for one client. Nada for the others.
— Public Advertising Agency (@publicadagency) November 24, 2021
Big jump today on some projects. News publisher.
— John (@DrigJohn) November 24, 2021
First, Happy Thanksgiving! Second, I mentioned tremors yesterday & looks like we are seeing more today (which makes sense.) Here are 2 sites that dropped initially & have come back a bit (not to where they were, but not as bad as they were). Stay tuned, we could be seeing more. https://t.co/FnxD0JiAeW pic.twitter.com/eLhSAL9xt4
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 25, 2021
And many more on Twitter just scroll through the responses there...
Tracking Tools
The tracking tools are showing big changes as well.
Mozcast:
Google weather for Tue 11/23 - 94 deg. F and Stormy (https://t.co/cOmqWYr560)
— MozCast (@mozcast) November 24, 2021
So it seems like something has heated up in the past day or so, during the biggest online shopping season of the year.