Over the weekend, the Super Bowl LIX weekend, there has been a lot of chatter about ranking volatility and traffic losses. Truth is, I feel there is often chatter about traffic losses over a Super Bowl weekend, as many are watching the Super Bowl and not spending time searching Google as much.
So was there an unconfirmed Google search ranking update that rolled out over this past weekend? That is hard to say.
But here is what we are seeing.
And as a reminder, previously we reported ranking volatility on February 4th and 5th and Jan 29th and 30th and then over the previous weekend, prior to that Janaury 20th and this is all when some tools hade tracking difficulties.
The new changes started around Saturday, February 8th and continued through today, February 10th.
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the chatter I saw over the weekend in the comments in this post and on WebmasterWorld:
Is google going completely crazy now? The store has 0 visitors from Google today, even the news page is almost at a standstill. Other website owners I have just spoken to are also reporting a massive drop in traffic today.
MASSIVE drop this morning...
The traffic was quite high today, but mostly one page hits, none converting zombie junk.Must be accidental clicks. The IPs and other device/browser headers appear to be valid.
Reporting same...very big drop this morning. Home page is -62%. Search is -20%. Could be another temp Saturday drop...sometimes turns around later in the day.
Massive drop today so far and similar to the first week of January levels and very similar to last Sunday but compared to the month so far -70%! Bonkers
Terrible traffic today...not sure if because of Google or the superbowl. But traffic is way down internationally so I suspect it's more Google. Interesting how since Google started this latest crap I went from steady daily inquiries to not one single new inquiry in four days. Same sh!t, different day...
Traffic continues to drop. It's really terrible what's happening again.
Very worse weekend. Today seems not tob ebe any better. Even panda and penguin haven´t been this worse.
Huge drop this morning...
ALL Traffic is down........ WTF is going on ?
where is organic traffic?
Yikes, dire this morning, I'm 30 minutes off my first 12 hours of a googleday and at 20% of average whereas I would nomally be at about the 50% level ... It's all gone pear-shaped again.
Google Rank Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing - some showing an uptick in the past couple of days:
So is this just the Super Bowl effect or some real Google ranking volatility?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
