After a few days of calm Google weather, we are now seeing a spike in volatility, fluctuations and SEO chatter around Google search ranking movement. It is somewhat early on but I am seeing both a spike in SEOs noticing ranking movement and many of the tools are showing a spike in volatility.
So there may be a Google search ranking update going on. The last Google update we covered was an unconfirmed Google update on May 16th but then the volatility calmed over the past weekend for a few days. Now, it is spiking again starting today (maybe yesterday). As a reminder, the March 2024 core update started on March 5th and ended on April 19th, 45 days later. We then reported on ranking fluctuations both before April 25th (thinking it was the core update still) and also on May 3rd and also more ranking volatility on May 9th and it has not let up.
Yes, Google is now rolling out AI Overviews and new web filter but I doubt this is causing the volatility.
Google Tracking Tools
As you can see, most of these tools have been super heated and showing a lot of Google ranking volatility over the past week.
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the early SEO chatter I found at WebmasterWorld over the past day or so:
I start to receive traffic more in line with my business, inquiries are better! Let’s see if it’s a 2 days thing or Google getting better ….
My traffic is up 50 % against last week
I thought I was having a reasonable traffic day until I checked my logs and found that Singaporean Huawei Clouds bot had been 48.9% of visits. I’ve tried every method possble to block this thing without any success meaning thousands more visits over the next few days:-(
Obviously this also means my real traffic today is very low.
The big drop off in top three ranking terms continues…all in a very short span of time. Haven’t seen that in a while, but it doesn’t seem to be making traffic any worse than usual so it must be low volume terms that are dropping off. I am also seeing a lot of movement in the competitive terms this week…I dropped from #1 to #2, then to #3 on some terms that I have been #1 for for years. Then I jumped up to #1 for other terms, and jumped up 30+ spots for others. Is anyone else seeing this?
Are any of you noticing anything big going on now?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.