Google Search Ranking Fluctuations Proceed Via Weekend

Since the Google February 2023 product reviews update on February 21st, we’ve been seeing some pretty big swings in the search results – a lot of volatility, more than the norm. And that continued through the past weekend.

As a reminder, we reported on very large fluctuations on March 1stspikes on February 25th and now again this weekend.

It just seems weird that we are seeing so much volatility from this single update. There is a lot of folks who said they got hit initially, saw a recovery during one of these tremors, then again. So it may be that Google is tweaking this update, or another unconfirmed update was also rolled out at the same time. It is hard to know for sure but there is a lot of volatility over the past couple weeks. I suspect this confirmed product reviews update will be done soon.

Google Tracking Tools

Here is what these tools are showing for the weekend – a lot of them were pretty heated over the weekend:

semrush:

RankRanger:

Cognitive SEO:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accu anchor:

SERPmetrics:

Algoroo:

mozcast:

SEO chatter

Here is some of the SEO chatter from over the weekend from WebmasterWorld other here:

I had same results for last updates, big traffic Increase then conversion down. Since last “update” lost around 25% traffic but converted more and having more leads for sales.Seems like I’ve recovered from the 24th Feb drop. I lost 30% of traffic on the Google update day and then it slowly came back, and today I’m 100% back to where I was before. Seeing the same as Dalnoon – I am recovering. It’s hard to say some exact numbers, but something is happening just right now. Rankings and traffic (especially rankings) continue to go down every day for all of my sites, none of which have anything to do with reviews. The review update thing didn’t make much change to this trajectory, maybe it accelerated it a bit.Results in the UK are completely irrelevant over the last few days. Yesterday/today I’m seeing ‘top stories’ for ‘…. services’ searches. Imagine looking for a mechanic or another professional service and seeing ‘top stories’ taking most of your screen, it’s almost like a bad comedy. Whatever they’re doing they are so lost this time it’s laughable. There is massive shuffling since yesterday night. I think that is the last stage of the update and things settle down in a few days.I saw the biggest drop in ranking in months yesterday…it looks like a big shakeup. I dropped like a stone from #1 to #3 while the former top two regained their spots. It seems that Google is favoring huge sites again. I checked today and it seems that I am still where I was, albeit in 2nd spot…so looks like it might have been temporary.Ranking and comparison websites in the apparel sector definitely saw a bump. EU Markets here. Maybe the only exception being Germany and France where there is so much over optimisation that there is wiggle room. Eastern Europe saw some shifts 100%. Today’s traffic is equal to zero, for my niche as compared to the previous analysis Monday I used to have heavy traffic and many leads but today it is nothing.

Have you noticed much over the weekend?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.