Over the past few days there has been weird levels of chatter from within the SEO industry around a possible Google Search algorithm update. I say weird because some are saying the fluctuations in the search results are super high and some are saying nothing is going on at all. Plus most of the tools show nothing but some do show some changes.
It can be one of those updates that impacted only specific niches or verticals. It can be some sort of rollback from the November 4th unconfirmed update. It can be some sort of bug with specific sites or the Google algorithm. I do not know.
But let me share some of the chatter from within the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread and also some screen shots of the tracking tools.
The chatter slowly started on November 6th and then spiked a bit around November 8th and continued on and off even through this morning. It is weird levels of chatter, like I said before.
Strange thing happened today. Visits spiked up 133% compared to last week for about 3 hours than bounced sharply back to previous weeks levels. Did someone experienced the same?
Yes, I saw the exact same thing. I had a huge surge of traffic from 10am-noon and was excited, then it dropped off and by end of day my traffic is a bit down.
I am definitely seeing movement on the first pages of my SERPs, I need to delve more to see if / how much I have been affected.One thing is noticeable today, Saturday, email spam is way down, I've been getting all sorts of garbage this week!
Also saw traffic spike on one of my sites on the 6th. Same as August 10th, but much less intense.
Now for November 8th:
I'm seeing huge traffic spikes on two of my sites for 2.5 hrs. GA shows it as direct traffic.
Bearing in mind the significance of today I am not at all surprised by the extremely low traffic levels across all my sites.
I got excited to see a big spike in traffic yesterday, but it was mirage...today right back down and then some. My USA traffic is -23% today. Something happened last weekend and USA traffic has suffered all week. The elections are over so not sure if there was a minor update in the background, but it feels like it.
Traffic seems to be back to normal today for me however it's generally inconsistent now until January with many wholesale buyers only fishing for pricing for the New Year.
Then November 10th:
Super volatile right now. Yesterday was very poor after a good weekend. US election threw my traffic off last week so hard to say what's going on.
My Discover traffic is completely dead right now.
LOTS of volatility going on now....
I have never seen conversions being so bad before. Before all these horrible updates by Google, conversions were stable and they were improving based on the strategies that we used. Now it's like we're falling under the whim of Google. I don't know what to do anymore. I've tried everything I can. I've read through everyone's posts and suggestions and did just about everything that I could. It's infuriating.
Let's move over to the tracking tools.
Mozcast saw a small bump recently:
SERPMetrics the same:
Algoroo is calm:
Advanced Web Rankings seems pretty calm?
Accuranker same:
RankRanger shows a bump:
Cognitive SEO shows a bump as well:
SERPstat shows a bit of a change:
SEMRush same, shows a bump:
Heck, the local side shows big changes with BrightLocal's tool:
Maybe it was all the election madness?
So I am not sure - just seems like a weird one. What have you noticed with the sites you manage?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
