I was offline the past two days but when I came back, I saw a nice amount of chatter of a possible Google update starting around September 11th. Most, not all, of the tools are showing significant volatility and there is some chatter. The chatter is not too extreme but some of the tracking tools are off the charts. That is not to say the chatter is not there, it 100% is there but not as big as the Medic Update at least.
We did see some early chatter last week, it died down quickly and now it is back up. We also saw some signs of an update on August 22nd. You can see all our confirmed and mostly unconfirmed Google updates in one place if you want.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has the chatter beginning September 10th, which normally is a day before the tools picking it up. Here is some of that chatter:
I just checked my stats for yesterday and I ended the day up over 20% with the jump in traffic starting at 8pm EDT. I was up over 50% between 8pm and midnight. If this sticks I would have recovered from the August 1st update. Its too early to tell how today will turn out. My fingers are crossed.
Big spike in semrush, means there is a very, very high probability an algorithm update is taking place. Watch the serps, it looks as wacky was it was in August. I am still checking how it affected my website. Fingers crossed for everyone that got hit by the recent updates.UPDATE! I dont see any major changes on my end yet.
My competitors (as usual) got the upper hand in the current update. I didnt budge anywhere yet but it can take more time, my guess is another 72 hours. I did improve a few things on my end, I truly hope google will 'reward' me with my old keywords.
It would appear that you are correct. The update Google pushed on 9/5/18 killed off what little conversions Google was sending to our site, though this was made up with increased sales on Amazon. Info queries remained about the same, but it does underscore the problem Google has with their attempts to remain relevant in the ecommerce sector after years of promoting Amazon with top domain crowded results. For some of our most important buyer keywords, Google had no problem giving Amazon the top three organic results. Google taught shoppers to go straight to Amazon and that's what most of them do now - cutting Google out of the entire shopping cycle. We'll see if what Google is pushing today will have any impact on conversions, but I'm not holding my breath.
We definitely saw a drop WOW. Seasonality is in play, but WOW on Monday was labor so it should have been up. Leads us to believe something is going on.
I rarely look at any of the SERP volatility tools, but I just noticed that SEMRush is showing ~9.3, which is among the highest I've ever seen on that particular tool. This is as of Wed 9/12 at 2 am ET. Visually inspecting a few phases across a couple of sectors that I monitor, I am not seeing any significant changes. Are any of you noticing anything noteworthy?
Big drop in traffic today, despite posting an article yesterday and it already reaching position zero. Google is like being friends with a narcissist, one day you're fantastic, the next you're dirt.
There is also chatter at the Black Hat World forums, Google Webmaster help forums and on Twitter.
Anyone seeing heavy algo activity yesterday. Seeing some big sites taking gains/losses, including some reversal of fortune from the past couple of weeks (although that's entirely anecdotal at the moment).
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) September 11, 2018
Even John Mueller from Google responded in a sarcastic manner:
Looks like 9.3
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 11, 2018
Here are screen shots from the tools.
Did you notice changes? Let us know.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Black Hat World and Google Webmaster help.
