I am seeing a lot of renewed chatter within the SEO industry of a possible unconfirmed Google search ranking update touching down in the past 24-hours or so. The weird thing is that the tools are not really showing much of a spike in volatility but the chatter seems incredibly high.
Previously we reported ranking volatility on Jan 29th and 30th and then over the previous weekend, prior to that Janaury 20th and this is all when some tools hade tracking difficulties.
Now I am seeing a lot of chatter:
SEO Chatter
Most of the chatter is coming from within this site, in this post and this post but I am also seeing chatter on WebmasterWorld.
Here are some select quotes:
I hesitate when I type this however I have just seen my 9th consecutive day of averages improvement.My Jan 1-25 v Jan 26 to Feb 3 has seen +44% in both page views and visitors and this increase is being seen again today.
The most noticeable difference though is visitor engagement viewing and researching more pages like they used to especially from Eurasia.
Was a switch flicked recently? No doubt it will go off again soon!
On my side the opposite, every day with moderate drops and today massive drop in the morning.
I have increasing impressions but decreasing clicks and a tanking average position.
Who else has problems with loss of impressions in Search Console?
impression lost in search console for my 10 websites, is there any unconfirmed update is going on.
Traffic Is dead today
My entire site tanked on 5 Feb , seems another lousy update behind the bars.
yesterday was a good day. traffic "normal", lots of sales. But in the late evening it slowly vanished again and this lasts till today. Bing is picking up and is going to overtake Google traffic. amazon sales are going strong and keep growing. Maybe Google should stop tricking users into clicking useless ads and return to old values.
Google has shot up to be my number 1 traffic source.Something doesn't add up though. Statcounter shows 350 total views over last 6 hours. Statcounter also claims this is my last 9 hour traffic total.
Regardless, I can see the visits coming from Google. They are happening.
I've held off reporting since the December 24 spam update. But I got a full HCU recovery.
So it seems like something is brewing.
Google Rank Tracking Tools
The weird part is that the tools seem pretty calm:
Some of this makes me wonder if there is some sort of bug with the performance reports in Google Search Console - but the sites I checked that I have access to, do not show any weird data - yet.
What are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
