It’s been a few days since we last talked about Google Search ranking volatility, but it seems like there’s more movement in the search results again, so here’s an update. This time, it doesn’t appear as drastic as previous events, but there’s enough activity to note that it surpasses a typical day.
Some website owners and SEOs are noticing significant changes, both positive and negative. I’m documenting this just in case you’re seeing similar shifts on your site, particularly around October 15th, and possibly the day before. To give some context, we last reported similar changes around October 10th and before that, on October 2nd, which lasted a few days.
The Google August 2024 core update ran from August 15th to September 3rd. Even after it officially ended, the effects were felt significantly for some time. There were notable signals on or around September 6th, the 10th, and possibly the 14th. Additional activity occurred around September 18th, last weekend, September 25th, and the 28th. Now, a new spike in volatility and discussion has been observed from around October 1st and 2nd.
Google Tracking Tools
Several tools have shown increased activity over the past few days. This period has been tumultuous, marked by significant spikes in volatility.
- SERPmetrics
- Cognitive SEO
- Advanced Web Rankings
- Accuranker
- Wincher
- Mozcast
- Semrush
- Data For SEO
- Mangools
- Algoroo
- SimilarWeb
- Sistrix
- SERPstat
SEO Community Discussion
Here are some reactions from SEO communities, including WebmasterWorld, over the past few days:
- "Big drop today. Anyone else?"
- "For me the opposite – looks slightly better than previous days, although too early to tell."
- "USA and Canada both fairly low, but it is a holiday in the US. I am noticing a couple of things: More pages showing up as ‘crawled, not indexed’ in Google Search Console and Google is not following my robots.txt and is indexing URLs with query strings that I have disallowed, showing as 404 errors."
- "After a tiny ray of hope yesterday, today traffic seems to be back to maximum low."
- "Traffic seems very low today. I don’t care anymore. lol"
- "Today? Like everyone else, it dropped drastically and got throttled to 30% of the usual. And it stayed there for hours and no one came to all my sites, fancy that."
- "Yeah, it seems everyone has a little spike from time to time but there’s no consistency at all. It’s like constant volatility. I really don’t know how it got this bad."
- "Anyone else seen their traffic plummet today?"
- "Yeah, mine dropped like a rock today. That’s how it goes though. One day up 70%, next day down 80%, then up again. I don’t work in niches where it’s supposed to be like that either. Before all this started, traffic was consistent every day, not like the current ups and downs."
- "Five of my competitors must have lost rankings significantly."
This ongoing volatility is unusual, especially after a core update. Many are finding it unsettling.
Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
