In my Friday video, I mentioned some more volatility heating up on Friday morning and I promised to cover it if I see more signs of that update. Well, many of the other tools noticed volatility around April 25th, this past Friday, in addition to the 22nd and 23rd volatility we covered earlier last week.
Now while we often almost always see a Google search ranking update or volatility weekly, we don't always see volatility spike twice in the same week (although, we have).
Before this, we had 22nd and 23rd volatility and then around April 16th and then before that around April 9th. We have yet to have second official update in 2025, we had the March 2025 core update but no other official update in 2025 - yet.
Google Tracking Tools
Here are the charts, look at the Friday spikes on April 25th across many of these tools:
Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the chatter at WebmasterWorld and our site from this timeframe:
Yesterday I had 8.500 online/30min, Since 3pm it started to decline fast. Today I am down 70% with no reason... It is 5pm here and still haven;t reach 50K views, while yesterday we had more than 300K views.
My websitte dropped from 30k users per day to lesse than 10k. Completely gone from Discover (70% of the traffic). Don't know what to do. I thin I will just try to be a Youtuber.
Traffic is trash today. haha but who cares.
And another big drop since yesterday evening. Meanwhile, there are more and more complaints on Reddit about how bad Google has become. Normal users seem to catch up with these bad serps and the annoying ads all over the place.
There must be some update happening on Discover! It's not normal, and when you look at it, you see that only older posts are showing up!
I have to admit that I can't complain at the moment. My news site has been on a rollercoaster ride this month, with constantly changing rankings, but overall visitor numbers have been significantly higher than in recent months. Advertising revenue has also increased (significantly). The last few days have been really mixed, with one or two days of very little traffic followed by days of extremely high traffic. In addition, my podcast, which is part of the website, got a boost from Google this month.So I can say that I'm happy at the moment. We created a content plan over the last few weeks and are currently implementing it, so it's nice to see that it's paying off. The shop had a huge slump over Easter, but since then, revenue has stabilized and the ranking is similar to the news site: up, down, up, down, etc. But at least there hasn't been a day without sales (via Google traffic) so far.
Huge drop on Saturday.
Oh, and Glenn Gabe posted some more details on the 21st (I had it as 22/23) volatility:
Heads-up. Barry reported on volatility around 4/22-ish and I'm seeing that with a client right now (big-time). I don't know if it will stick, but it's def. worth noting. They saw a ton of volatility on 4/21 and have surged across many queries -- including taking the #1 spot for… pic.twitter.com/QTOyY2YQWY
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 27, 2025
How are you all doing with these wild Google search ranking volatility?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
