I am seeing early signs and signals of a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update going on right now. It seems to have kicked off this morning and is now spiking in terms of chatter in the SEO forums and also some of the tools have picked up on it (not all are updated yet). Google has not confirmed any update, so this is one of those unconfirmed updates.
We spotted one of these updates most recently over last weekend and honestly, most of these unconfirmed updates have been happening over the weekends (maybe Friday (are they on Fridays anymore?) search launches). In any event, this is unusual in that there is chatter spiking on a Thursday morning and not on the weekend, which is what we have had for the past several unconfirmed updates.
SEO Industry Chatter
Here is some of the chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums starting up just hours ago, I expect it to get more intense as SEOs begin their work days:
Wow..... the results for some phrases are BAD right now. Was looking up a TV show (not my niche, just interested) - search not that far down was from a forum discussion and the title for the SERP was: persons-name-tv-show-title
Moving the Cheese game is back
Something happening today
-50% in just one day.
More news sites ranking above me today with just one sentence on my keyword. My article is 3,000 words about the keyword -30% worse ever in the 15 years of running my site. Don't mind losing ranking to an article that is better and more informative to the user but its newspaper click bate with about 10 lines. Gosh.
Same situation for me Samsam (11 years or running our site
No recovery.... damage from featured snippets continue as I've just seen some of the ones we rank for have gotten longer (ie bigger paragraph of text lifted and displayed).And yet still not good enough for Discover since whatever it was they did in March. Yet content that literally has SPONSORED CONTENT in the title shows up in Discover. Well done, excellent UX!
More changes in the UK this morning.
There are also a bunch of comments in other forums including the general Google forums and on this site:
Some more movement this morning in the UK. We saw a slight dial back of the previous late April update during the posted update (may). This morning, it looks like more of the previous late April. So whatever every happened in early May, I think it was only temporary
Trust me, this is a significant amount of chatter for such a short time period in the early morning hours.
Search Tracking Tools
Like I said, it is super early, so most of the tools are not showing major changes yet, but I suspect they will as time goes on. Here are the tools showing signs of an update, I may add new tools throughout the day as they update:
SEMRush has updated numbers for today:
SERPMetrics is swinging upwards:
Do you see significant ranking changes this morning or traffic changes from Google organic search?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: Well, this is not a core update:
We haven't had a broad core update. We do announce those. That said, we have updates all the time. Sites can move around for smaller updates; sites themselves make changes; content overall changes that produces changes.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 13, 2021
But we do have small updates that happen all the time. They can produce changes, as any update might. Plus, content itself is always changing, and since ranking is dynamic, that causes changes even if we made no updates at all.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 13, 2021
