I am seeing a significant spike in chatter from within the SEO community about a possible Google Search ranking update and/or heavy volatility happening starting October 31st. Let's call it the Halloween 2024 Google Search ranking update - because why not...
The chatter began yesterday late morning and has continued throughout the day. There are also some of the tracking tools picking this up, in fact, SimilarWeb spotted the volatility in a big way yesterday, showing its most heated day in over a month.
The chatter seemed to have cooled as of this morning and so did SimilarWeb. Most of the other tools picked up a small spike. Although, it seems more are now talking about it after 7am ET today.
I am suspecting there was some shift in the late morning and then it shifted back? It is hard to say for sure? What did you all see?
As a reminder, Google did tell us that an search update is coming soon. The last time we reported on an update was on October 23, 24 and 26 and 27th and before that, October 19th and 20th volatility and then on October 15th, October 10th and then before that on October 2nd which lasted a couple of days. The Google August 2024 core update started on August 15th and officially completed on September 3rd. But it was still super volatile the day after it completed and also weeks after it completed and it has not cooled.
We saw big signals on and around September 6th, September 10th or so and maybe around September 14th. We also saw movement around September 18th, last weekend and Septmeber 25th and September 28th or so.
SEO Chatter
Let's start with the chatter in the past 24-hours from both WebmasterWorld and on this site:
It must be here already my traffic was down yesterday and is down hugely this morning. Let's see if this is just a short term shakeup because if not it's going to be ugly...Oh, and as usual...I had one week where I had a normal level of new inquiries and then back to zero this week, not one new customer inquiry just spam.
After 13 hours of my Googleday I am seeing a total collapse across global, national and regional sites. Global sites are at 20% and regional at 30% ... What have they done now?
There's also a lot of volatility here. There were 4 days of huge drops, yesterday was a little better. Today there's a lot of traffic, but curiously, it doesn't match the AdSense data...Usually when this happens to my sites, they announce the beginning of an update right after...
Seeing a 50% drop in traffic today.
18 hours and at 40%!
At this time of year I expect our travel-planning site's traffic to drop off (week over week), because that's been the seasonal pattern for 20+ years. And to be sure, our overall traffic is showing its usual post-summer decline, but our Google traffic has actually been up for the last several days. Caveat: I don't expect Google's burst of mild generosity to hold. (It never does.)
seeing about - 35 % today here in Germany, yesterday was already not the best, but today the traffic is coming in very slow
Google is starting to shuffle again. haha. I am sure they will punish us some more because of this GPT launch.
It's a Thursday. Every damn Thursday or Friday, they do the shuffle. I don't care anymore. I hope GPT sends me some traffic. I am broke. lol
OK, so early observation. I have as much traffic to my site today (7AM), as I would usually get till 12PM. It is a Friday and these tend to be slow. I don't see any ranking change on Google. is it because of GPT? I have to delve deeper.
in Romania there are big problems on the organic traffic side of Google. Big Drop everywhere.. about -40-45%. We manage over 60 websites and not one has remained intact.
A sharp increase in Dsicover traffic today, back to where it was two weeks ago, just before the massive collapse. Does anyone else actually understand what Google is doing all this time? I just don't see the point of all the changes and it looks more and more like Google has lost control of its algorithm.
Google Tracking Tools
SimilarWebm showed a massive spike yesterday, some of the other tools are showing a bit of a lift today/yesterday but it may have cooled a bit today. Maybe Google was testing something spooky yesterday morning/afternoon? Super hard to say...
SERPmetrics (not updated in a couple of week or so):
So what are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
