It's been a handful of days since we reported on any Google Search ranking volatility and although I really don't want to say we are seeing more volatility in the Google search results, well, we are, so I am reporting on it again.
This time, I don't think it is as drastic as last time, or some of the previous times. But it hit my benchmark where there is enough chatter and enough ranking volatility being reported that it is above the typical day.
Some site owners and SEOs saw they saw some big movement - some for the positive and some for the negative. So I figured I'd document it, in case, you saw the same thing with your site around October 15th (maybe the day before as well).
Again, to catch you up, the last time we reported on these changes was around October 10th and then before that on October 2nd which lasted a couple of days. The Google August 2024 core update started on August 15th and officially completed on September 3rd. But it was still super volatile the day after it completed and also weeks after it completed and it has not cooled.
We saw big signals on and around September 6th, September 10th or so and maybe around September 14th. We also saw movement around September 18th, last weekend and Septmeber 25th and September 28th or so. And yep, now, we are seeing another big spike in volatility and chatter starting around October 1st and 2nd.
Google Tracking Tools
You can see some of the tools starting to spike again over the past day or two. It has been heated for the longest period of time and we get these even larger spikes throughout.
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the chatter from the SEO communities here and at WebmasterWorld over the past day or so:
Big drop today. Anyone else?
For me the opposite - looks slightly better than previous days, although too early to tell.
USA and Canada both fairly low, but it is a holiday in the US. I am noticing a couple of things:1) More pages showing up as "crawled, not indexed" in Google Search Console and 2) Google is not following my robots.txt and is indexing urls with query strings that I have disallowed. They are showing up as 404 errors
After tiny ray of hope yesterday, today traffic seems to be back to maximum low.
traffic seems very low today. I don't care anymore. lol
Today? Like everyone else, it dropped drastically and got throttled to 30% of the usual (that I always comment about - this bloody same cap of 30%!). And it stayed there for hours and no one came to all my sites, fancy that.
Yeah it seems everyone has a little spike from time to time but there's no consistency at all. It's like constant volatility. I really don't know how it got this bad
Anyone else seen their traffic plummet today?
Yeah mine dropped like a rock today. That's how it goes though. one day up 70% Next day down 80% Next up again. I don't work in niches where it's suppose to be like that either. Before all this started Traffic is consistent everyday. Never up's and down every other day like this.
Five of my competitors must have lost rankings significantly.
This constant ups and downs it just so weird, we normally do not have this level of volatility for so long, after a core update. I am just not sure what is going on but it is unsettling for a lot of us.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
