Last week, Google updated its search results causing a fluctuation in and shuffling of search results. According to the SEMrush sensor, tremors peaked at 8.7 out of 10 on the volatility scale. Even today, the tremors are still above the normal range at 5.3.
A continuous WebmasterWorld thread had a surge in greivances from both SEOs and webmasters. Complaints surrounded automated tracking tools and ranking shuffles Below you can see some of the comments from the thread:
This week was the worst week we have seen from Google since panda 4. With all other updates we gained traffic but this one hit us with >50%. Sales from google organics, AdWords and Shopping ads are off by 95%. And no comment from google. I guess the only thing they have to say: it was an quality update.
We have seen the same. We’ve grown massively over the past few months and this week we have lost ranking from positions 2/3 to 5/6. Its impacted us dramatically.
I’ve noted some interesting changes in the SERPs this week. Too early to say what’s up, and it’ll have to settle before making a better assessment.
For info sites, I’ve seen recent good results by moving away from keyword structured pages to answer based content. Those pages got a jump in SERP inclusion.
I know a lot of people take these types of tools with a pinch of salt, but Algoroo and moz and showing big movements today in the US. In my experience, the UK usually follows. Hopefully its a reversal of what happened last week – because we’ve definitely been hit with something.
What Google is aiming is very clear to me : long tail. That’s why we don’t see huge changes with the few keywords we monitor, but huge changes in global traffic. G is giving long tail to someone else, not us, “small” webmasters.
Is anyone noticing something big today? My traffic is almost zero. It looks like Google has turned off the tap.
As you can see in the Algoroo screenshot above, we haven’t seen this kind of disruption since the Fred update in March 2017. The major difference between these two instances is that Google still hasn’t announced why the September fluctuation happened. If still hard to say if this fluctuation is related to the September 20 update or not.
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