I am seeing early signs of a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update starting yesterday, February 28th, and into today, February 29th. The chatter started to spike yesterday amongst the SEO community and some of the third-party rank tracking tools are showing a spike in volatility.
Again, Google has not confirmed an update in over 16-weeks now but we have had plenty of unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm updates since then, including a weird one this past weekend.
Keep in mind, we are all waiting patiently for the next big Google update that Google has been promising since November.
Maybe I should have named this the Leap Day Google update?
So what are we seeing related to this possible unconfirmed Google Search update?
Google Tracking Tools:
Let's start with what the tools are showing:
Some of the tools have not yet updated for the day, so I may come back here to update them later.
SEO Chatter
The SEO chatter is just starting up and most of the chatter I am seeing is coming from the comments area here (I'll weed out the noise for you by embedding the relevant comments here) and some from WebmasterWorld:
Had a week (again) of amazing conversions - today, just dropped like a rock...here we go.
Anyone else experiencing low Traffic today??
Awful today. After 2 reasonable days
Yes. This week has been horrendous since Monday. I've hit the lowest low since September.
Google traffic was better than usual on Sunday and Monday, normally traffic is almost dead from Saturday to Monday. Today, however, things are looking bad. Google traffic so far is significantly lower than usual on a Tuesday. This back and forth is really getting on my nerves.
On Sunday I also noticed uphill traffic, then today when I woke up it was -20% and now -7%. They just move a paa higher or lower and the traffic suffers
Same here...Sunday and Monday very strong traffic. Tuesday off a cliff again. USA traffic is -22% at 4:30pm. The question is, when traffic is high is it converting?
Yesterday was a miserable day for me, as I expected. -43% compared to Sunday and Monday. Sistrix shows a drop of 5.1% for my website in its visibility index today. A look on my direct competitors shows that they have been hit even harder. Other websites that I monitor have also fallen sharply.
Maybe whatever rolled out over the past weekend reverted in some way?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: The volatility has calmed over the weekend:
Google Search result volatility has calmed this weekend - story from a few days ago about the Lead Day ranking shifts https://t.co/07yktovR2n pic.twitter.com/rBdFYkHUaN
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 3, 2024
