Google Search Ranking Volatility Spikes Friday January 24th Through Weekend

Google Search may have pushed some unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update or tweak around Friday, January 24th. I briefly mentioned this on my Friday video but I felt it was worth kicking up here as its own story.

It seems like the SEO chatter within the community spiked in a huge way this Friday and through the weekend. With a lot of SEOs noticing big changes in their rankings, positions and traffic from Google Search.

Also, some of the tools spiked on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

We also reported volatility around January 20th and then the JavaScript Google changes that caused some tools to have tracking issues.

That being said, here is what am I seeing:

SEO Chatter

I am seeing a huge spike in chatter within WebmasterWorld starting on Friday afternoon and through that Friday and into Saturday and Sunday. There is also a lot of chatter in the comments here. Let me share some quotes from both areas:

We are seeing the complete opposite. Massive drops in traffic. Today started with 37% of "normal traffic". Most of the traffic single page views ( no robots ). Traffic seems to be 100% mismatched,
Pattern with flowing traffic change with long times with no traffic at all. A pattern that we didn´t see for two years.

One thing I have seen for months now is a perpetually low amount of traffic from Germany. One day it seems normal, and the next day it drops like a stone. Are you referring to DE traffic, or is this all of your traffic? My DE traffic was stable for many years, but now it vanishes every other day. Canada is also very low all the time these days

I have to agree with Martin again, there is only one difference: the traffic is high (only from Germany), but zero sales from what comes from Google. The news page is also running strangely, today a bit better again, but the last few days have been terrible.

Have to agree with Martin Ice Web regarding A/B-like testing of two versions of results or SERP layouts. Yesterday the non-junk version was enabled for about half a day. During the night they switched back to junk version and today it stays that way (low traffic).
Micha, maybe you are getting so much non-converting traffic because Google assumes that you have super duper "authority" since you are a shop/ecomm site with street address and entity (business name), and it is sending some of the purely informational traffic to you instead of some random AI generated spam sites (because Google can't recognize legitimate info sites anymore).

HUGE drop today!

Yes, huge drop here too...started at 8am sharp. Traffic was actually deteriorating the entire day yesterday from 11am, but today is a steeper drop.

DROP , here we go!
But i am sure they are cooking January or Feb Core update nothing else . The Goog engineers gotta prove themselves by making search better every day, isn't it.

Here, too: drop. It seems impossible to grow. On Google, there is only one direction left: down. @sj7411 Since Google just updated its search Quality Rater Guidelines, an update should actually come now, it always has when it has been updated.

Impressions are really really low too. Let’s see what will bring the next update.

Whatever update they rolled out last weekend, yesterday/today they've rolled it right back. Last weekend I jumped up nicely, but this morning (UK) I've dropped back to exactly where I was before for lots of keywords. More frustratingly, google are still allowing plenty of site reputation abuse here.