New Google Search Algorithm Ranking Fluctuations On December 26th

While it has been calm for the past several days, today is a new day and I am seeing some signs of more volatility and ranking fluctuations as of the past 24 hours or less. Some of the automated tracking tools are picking it up, and I am seeing some renewed chatter in the SEO industry.

Maybe this is a continuation of the delayed helpful content and link spam updates or maybe this is a new Google search ranking update? It is super hard to say. We saw some big turbulence days before Christmas and then things clamed down a lot.

So what are we seeing?

SEO Chatter

Here is some of the renewed chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums:

As in previous years traffic is slowly returning with it already at 33% today with its usual country spread, if it achieves 60% for Weds-Fri that would be normal for me.

I am seeing UK traffic back to average this morn. USA and CA is still abysmally low... down 54% and 76% at noon. Traffic to my home page has been getting lower and lower since the 13th, this morning -70%. Search is still -30% today, direct is -35%. We will see if this slowly recovers this week and 1st week of January...

Position changes for numerous sites!

So i didn't have time to check my blog's stats for past ~2 weeks because of chrismas time, but now i'm really shocked. Gaming niche, eastern europe, depending on GA our traffic increased by more than a dozen percent viewers and our visibility in GSC just rocked up. We have many views of reviews and test taht were on ~30-40 position in google. Now they are top10. It's the first time from last 12 months when our visibility has increased. Not many backlinks, maybe some from wikipedia and not even a single paid. We're just creating quality content.

I am also seeing some chatter in the comments area here:

How many of you recovered? Seems like we are back on the ride, and it was really "profit update"

We see mixed signs, some crawlers are hyperactive on some of our sites.

I see some changes in the SERPs today in my niche. All over the place.

There is also this?

Italian YMYL site.
Sept 13: big boost
Dec 20: big drop
Dec 26: recover?
Is it possibile HCU and/or link spam update are recalculating starting from an old dataset, so at first we see a drop and now a"recover", reflecting Sept 13 boost? @Marie_Haynes @dannysullivan @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/pYTxfNgRLL

— Matteo Giannone (@matteogiannone) December 28, 2022

Google Search Tracking Tools

Here are what the tools are showing as of this morning, some have not yet updated:

RankRanger:

Semrush:

Cognitive SEO:

SERPmetrics:

Mozcast:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

Algoroo:

SERPStat:

It is a bit early with the volatility right now, but Google Search does seem to be heating up right now... Which is weird since Google said they try to slow these things during the holidays for safety reasons. So maybe it is not what we think it is?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.