Google Search Rating Replace On January nineteenth and twentieth

Google has been busy for the past few weeks after taking a little hiatus with the new years. It seems that we are again seeing signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update Yesterday and today, January 19 and 20. And no, these updates are independent of crawl spike activity.

There is both SEO industry talks and data from the tracking tools to back this up, but yes we don’t have Google confirmation of an update.

Last time we had unconfirmed Google search updates on January 14, 15 and 17, then before that 11th January and then it was quiet until some Trembling in late December.

SEO industry chatter

The chatter just begins with a renewed discussion at WebmasterWorld As of January 18, here are some of the first snippets from this thread related to recent Google volatility:

One of my pages is about a sport called cricket and today a lot of terms came up out of nowhere. Guess which country? Moldova – having no idea it’s even a sport, most would know it as an animal. I wonder how long this will last? Tuesday again good traffic with 131.3% and today so far 87.0%

The sources, queries, and paths are all normal, but not resulting in many new requests yet, but this is not uncommon.

All my SERPs look normal.

Massive fluctuations again this morning. In our affiliate niche, we have many high DA newspaper and blog sites whose “top 10 listings” outperform dedicated affiliate sites. The Herald, The Scotsman, The Denver Post, The Mercury News all appear. A few previous top 10 sites just got thrown in the long grass – pages 4 and 5. It’s happened before and bounced back pretty quickly. But the volatility that has persisted for weeks – since early December – is not abating. Very sharp increase in traffic across the board for the last two days… yesterday it was up 30% including US traffic. My ranking hasn’t changed much though… Regained 4 top3 terms, lost all the next day. My top 3/10 ranking remains at less than half of what it was a year ago. So if the rank isn’t improving, where is all the traffic suddenly coming from?

Also…a popular art magazine just published an in-depth article about me that 5 days later hasn’t been indexed…nothing. The on-page tags are correct, and the site publishes many very high-quality editorials with freelance writers, but it doesn’t index or rank well when it does. It is a mystery to me…

On my side I see drops in the last two days and today the drop is getting bigger.

I expect to see more chatter from the SEO field later in the day…