The last likely Google confirmed update of the year, the November 2023 reviews update, completed last Thursday afternoon on the 7th. But days after it completed the Google search results are still super volatile and the fluctuations and chatter are heated.
Maybe I am wrong and Google is about to announce another helpful content update or core update tomorrow? But I would highly doubt it at this point in time.
Maybe this is leftover volatility from the reviews update? Maybe it is just normal Google flux. But there is a lot of flux, more than just the normal unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm updates I report on.
I'll show you the SEO chatter and what the tools are showing:
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the SEO chatter, the public discussions of SEOs talking about ranking fluctuations, that started after the Reviews update was completed. The chatter is both from WebmasterWorld and the comments on this site:
Big drops starting at 8am - 11am and again 2pm - 6pm. Traffic is swinging much more widely than normal and there are no new inquiries of any kind...neither emails nor calls. Google has just killed business off for a month now.
I have never been wrecked by an update like this one. At this point, I don't think I can afford the servers. Lost 40% of the remaining traffic in two days. overall down 70% and down 93% in two years. 8-year-old site with 8,000 posts and less than half of them are getting a single view a day. 90% of the sites outranking my site did not exist in the last 2 years.
Semrush sensor exploded today. High fluctuations everywhere. Now for many queries "people also ask" are follow by "people also search". The traffic drop for all.
Huge drop today... It seems to me that these updates are eternal. We will never have stability in the SERPs.
Things are even worse at weekends.Weekends used to be our best days, but since hcu, weekend traffic and conversions now plummet to the lowest levels in the week.
For years Greedle never did anything at weekends, but now they seem to do,
As anyone else had a negative change at weekends recently?
It is worse today.In fact, I was already noticing things getting bad last weekend. As then, the reviews update was still going on, so I put whatever little faith I had hoping it will recover since the update didn't end yet.
I got hit pretty big after they said their update is done and my site is not about reviews or anything like that. But it's not just me. The entire niche is getting hit badly. I lost 70% of my traffic in May of 2022. I recovered about 40% of it by doing videos and all kinds of things. But after this update, my traffic is about 10% of what it was in April of 2022. lol. At least as far as Google goes. Pretty much 90% lost and it's not because my site dropped. Every one of my competitors pretty much dropped too.
I took another 50 percent loss yesterday.
Same pattern here for my 7 year old site. Awful traffic today. I checked rankings, no change but traffic fell again.
My traffic went down 50% yesterday. With the 70% previous fall from HCU, I am looking at about 5% of the traffic I had.
My traffic is awful today. Absolutely awful.I don't think I'll be back here again. I'll probably give up blogging.
Those are just some of the hundreds, if not, thousands of complaints that cropped up after the Reviews update was done.
Google Tracking Tools
Many of the tools spiked over the weekend as well. I made a GIF of all the tools here as well - to spice things up a bit:
How was your weekend so far? I know it is Sunday but figured I'd post this today based on all the concern I see in the SEO industry.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
