Let me start off by saying that while there is a nice amount of chatter in the SEO community signaling some sort of Google update in the past few days, it is hard for me to be very confident because of all the changes Google made in the past week or so. But we do have chatter and some, not all, of the tools are showing changes as well. So there may have been a Google search ranking update in the past few days.
Like I said, Google is testing and changing how snippets look now and also making tweaks to the deduplication of featured snippets. So all of this may not just impact the tracking tools but how people click on the search results to your site and thus your traffic from Google organic search. But let's not forget some of the speculation around Forbes dropping on the 27th, although - for all I know, this could be an analytics tool bug and not an issue with ranking in Google.
That being said, here are recent some quotes from both Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld:
I believe another update started today the 26th. Again, we'll know its impact coming week.
It went stable for about 3 days here and now everything dropped +100 positions again...
My site that had some pages re-indexed thanks to bulkaddurl has dropped again today... Yeah. :(
last 2 days I lost my good position :)from 4 place to 11 place for medium keyword over 5000 K search monthly
I've got penalty for 40K scraped pages. I just dropped the website, can't bother reviving a dead horse.
This past week things were looking rather normal again on the 20th/21st with new inquiries coming in. Then from 22nd-26th silence. This is not a normal traffic pattern, Google is always manipulating...you get a day or two of good traffic toward the beginning of the week then Google clamps down. By Thursday / Friday my traffic is at weekend levels every week now.
Today, I see a spike in traffic too, same as you Samwest. But I'd rather hold the joy. Since I guess google removed the icon making it adjust the algo. When it feels that removing icon doesn't make sense, it might roll back anytime they want and that would make another dance (in my opinion)
And, something is again happening today; the 29th.
Jan 22nd to Jan 29th 2020 v 2019users +40.04% conversions -71.17%
same products, same religious widget season, that hurts. I think it is a speed update which there is nothing I can fix until 4g stops behaving so erratically which is down to the mobile providers.
And here are the charts from the tracking tools, again, some may not have been updated for the featured snippet changes.
RankRanger both desktop and mobile; mobile looks weird:
Bright Local - there are even some local fluctuations:
So there you have it - what do you all think? A Google update or no?
Forum discussion at Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld.
