Over the weekend I reported that the Google Search ranking volatility tools finally began to calm. But the truth is, I have seen a big spike in chatter around Google ranking changes over the weekend and more so through Monday. It seems that while the tools have calmed, the chatter has heated.
This morning, the tools began to trend upwards again but it is still not in the heated levels we have seen over the previous few weeks or so. But I cannot ignore the chatter going through the SEO community around a possible unconfirmed Google search ranking update.
SEO Chatter
Let's start with the more recent chatter over the past couple of days from WebmasterWorld and comments here:
Big drop today!
Yes, huge drop this morning starting at 8am after an entire week of stronger traffic. The inquiries that are coming in are startlingly bad...completely clueless fools asking to purchase things things that cost 20x their budgets. Google has truly learned how to skim the cream off completely and leave websites with the leftovers...I have never seen anything like it.
Very worse weekend with left over Google traffic. But Amazon sales are as high as never before. People clearly moving to Amazon for purchasing items.
I agree, bad weekend. The traffic is ridiculous. The Discover traffic has been at 0 since Wednesday, but the ranking has improved, it just doesn't help.
Massive drop today... The 'Google Dance' never ends...
'Google Dance' ...... massive drops!
Yes drop is huge since 3 days !
The carnage continues, my main .com 1-12 Jan 25 v 1-12 Jan 24 was -45.9%, yep almost halved and this trend, and it is a trend now, continues and is very doubtful to alter for international traffic.I am referring to international traffic since my .co.uk sites are experiencing a -10% drop in traffic which, considering the state of the UK economy, would seem to be in line with recent govt stats.
So, is it localisation that is affecting international B2B sites like mine when I see local (UK) sites not doing as bad?
I'm not sure about 'Cool Down'...since Saturday, our website has more than doubled its traffic. It dipped during the spam update. Google is weird.
Very bad weekend from Google. I see a different layout now with the top 1.5 scroll all ads. Prior to Friday, only the first full scroll were ads, meaning the ad saturation at the top of the SERPS increased by 50%.
Yeah i've been seeing some weird stuff too! I saw that were it was mainly all ad's at the top. Also, Seeing crazy Traffic throttling. Where rankings are all the same, but traffic will be down 90% than all of a sudden jump, then stop for another few hours.Not sure why, but why does it seem after the updates are more crazy then during the actual updates. Just from all the split testing they are doing?
Something happened on the 10th...Literally I am seeing the biggest moves when the tools show lows.
Last two days, almost zero sales and very low impressions. E-comm, USA, I'd been wondering what 'Friday-tweak' it would be this time. Could also be the fires in California and the ice/snow storms. Hoping that traffic will return to a somewhat normal pattern this week rather than a 'ghost-town feeling' like it is now.
Google Volatility Tracking Tools
So most of the tools are still very calm, but you can see they trended up a bit yesterday:
So when you thought things calmed down maybe they have not. As a reminder, let me catch you up on the past month or so:
We had the November 2024 core update finish in December, then we had a new December 2024 core update start and finish, while also having the December 2024 spam update start and finish in December as well. That is not to say anything has calmed down since the last official Google algorithm update of 2024 finished, it has not, it is crazy volatile. The crazy part, we are expecting a lot more core updates in 2025. Last weekend, we did have this weird Google local ranking bug that Google remained silent about.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
