I was incredibly tempted to do a special alert news story Saturday night on a Google algorithm update that seems to have touched down Saturday morning or late Friday but I decided to see how the Sunday chatter around it would be. In short, I noticed an unusual number of people complaining about the Google search results in the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread and some on Black Hat World starting early Saturday.
But Sunday and this morning, the chatter significantly died down. Some say whatever happened Saturday morning, it reverted back the next day. We have seen this before, it may have been a bug or something else but the chatter has 100% died down a lot.
Here is some of that Saturday chatter:
Thing are looking strange today, my bounce rate is up, and my page per session are down, Traffic is down marginally, too early to know for sure if it is significant. This after a few weeks of slowly but steadily growing traffic.
We're seeing a strong increase yesterday and today (compared to the same days last week), but it's probably because of the big, big increases in Texas and Florida traffic now that the hurricanes have moved on. (Florida is running 122 percent ahead of last Saturday, for example, and the day isn't over.)
Things Reverted to poor traffic on FRIDAY 15th and SAT SUN.. so whatever happened has gone back to #@$ now. =/
Total drop in traffic with sessions down over 20% on the week. Must be that "anomalous" overshoot of 4.3 clicks that triggered the hammer. Over the week, data insights were all sunshine and unicorns, yet end of week tally is a loss. smh - perhaps it was the hurricane murmuration. lol
Yes, most of the tools also went nuts on or around Sunday. Here are screen shots:
Mozcast:
SERP Metrics:
Accuranker:
RankRanger:
SEMRush:
Algoroo:
And now that Google says these tools are often right - and we have webmaster chatter - maybe something went wrong on Saturday with Google's search algorithms?
Are you noticing anything this morning or things are back to normal?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
