Update of the Google search rating on October sixth and seventh?

There were some indications of a possible Update of the Google search ranking algorithm which touched down on October 6th, got a little stronger on October 7th and fizzled out today, October 8th. The tools aren’t as crazy as at Update from last weekend but this time there is more chatter.

This is not confirmed, so it’s hard to tell what this update was about or if it was just about specific niches or something else. But not only did the tools skyrocket, not only did I see chatter in the SEO communities, people reached out to me directly to see if there was an update too. The chatter seemed to have stopped today, but it’s still early.

SEO chatter

Let’s start with the SEO chatter from the forums, I’ll leave out the tweets and emails I received. I’m just quoting from WebmasterWorld from around October 6th:

The October improvement continues for my global website, yesterday, Tuesday, PVs were exactly at our January through March average, direct traffic has increased significantly over the previous months. 10 a.m. US traffic shut off and shut down to almost zero for two hours … back to the same BS June pattern again. Does anyone else see that on their US traffic?

Traffic in the US is still a long way off for me, up 48% today at noon. Mainly due to the fact that my ranking for high volume terms on my top landing pages has dropped.

Traffic from Western Europe still far below normal, almost nonexistent. Britain stays strong, AU has reappeared but CA has disappeared. With Google nowadays they always make sure that your data traffic never runs on all cylinders.

In the middle of the day we saw a return in the decline in US traffic. Starts in the morning and the traffic stays very low for hours. Back to the old June patterns … For me, traffic has fallen off the cliff today, with hardly any more visitors with multiple page views.

In the past few weeks I’ve also seen many, many visits from Singapore to Huawei Clouds.

Yesterday was my worst day of traffic in years. Gulp! Today starts like a train wreck, although the ranking is higher … USA minus 31%, UK minus 56%, UAE minus 27% and so on. Many of my top landing pages have decreased by 30-65%, if any. Google changes the page layout a lot … adding more ads to the top and across the page. I don’t see users really like such a disorganized page. It’s like they go into a store and ask about one thing and are shown twenty other items before showing you what you asked for. Huge drop yesterday. Today is much worse. All of the competitors I track down are down today, with one exception. Some low volume keywords have been improved. The algorithms are constantly targeting high volume keywords

Tracking tools

The tracking tools mostly all show a shift in the Google search results, not as high as last weekend and, to be honest, not even as high. Some, like RankRanger, seem pretty quiet – but let me share the charts with you so you can see for yourself.

Semrush:

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Mozcast:

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Algoroo:

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Advanced web rankings:

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Accuranker:

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Cognitive SEO:

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SERPmetrics:

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SERPstat:

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RankRanger:

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So if you’ve seen rank fluctuations between October 6th and 8th, you are not alone.

Would you like to bet whether we’ll see any ranking fluctuations this weekend?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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