I was going to cover the chatter and signals of a Google update this past Friday on Friday but when the Search Engine Land spectacle touched down, I decided to wait it out and see how things settle over the weekend. There are still strong signs both in terms of community chatter and tracking tools around a Friday, November 30th update.
There seems to have been a Google search ranking algorithm update on November 30th, this past Friday. There is chatter on social media and in the ongoing WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World forums. Here is some of that chatter:
Yeah, I only started noticing it after around 6-7pm EST. I think the coming days will show some movement in the trackers.
Yeah, I just started noticing some big changes in the SERPs. Quite a few of my articles which ranked well still have been thrown to pages 2 and 3.
It's potentially a major update but is being overshadowed by SearchEngineLand being deindexed. Tons of movement in our industry and we specially got absolutely annihilated (again). We're used to it by now, literally nothing we do seems to ever help. October 2016 was still the last update that helped us in any significant way, everything since then has been a slow burn down.
Position for some keywords has improved significantly but no traffic boost.
Some of my pages that dropped have already popped back up and I've even made significant gains on a couple of high volume queries. Don't know whether the update is over yet or whether it's the rolling Panda component of RankBrain kicking back in.
Lost 25% seo traffic yesterday and another 25% traffic today :/ No big changes on site / links.
I would love to say that my small traffic gains over the past week or so was due to some "rollback" or fix on google's side. But as we all know: correlation does not imply causation. The only thing I changed was a small tweak to link velocity. Even still, no conclusions can be drawn from that. Good luck to everyone :)
Many of the tracking tools went a bit wild around this date as well. Here are some screen shots.
Check your analytics and data and see if you were impacted.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
