Google Caps off Volatile Week With Another Algorithm Update
10/08/2021What in the world is going on with the internet this week? It was only Monday that we reported that Google had rolled out a massive unconfirmed update, and the following day, Facebook experienced a colossal outage affecting billions of people around the world. Now, Search Engine Round Table is reporting yet ANOTHER unconfirmed update appears to be happening. And yes, this all happened in the span of a week. What a wild ride it’s been.
While this latest update doesn’t appear to be as big as the one that took place last weekend, Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Round Table is reporting that tracking tools seem to show that an update began rolling out on October 6th, peaked on October 7th, and is now starting to slow down.
This time around, there is way more industry chatter going on in the SEO forums. Here are some interesting snippets posted in WebmasterWorld around October 6th:
“Seeing a return of the drop in USA traffic in the middle part of the day again. Starts in the morning and traffic remains very low for hours. Back to the old June patterns…”
“For me traffic has fallen off the cliff edge today with hardly any multiple page view visitors.
Over the last few weeks I have also seen many, many visits by Singapore, Huawei Clouds.”
“Yesterday was my worst traffic day in years. Gulp!”
“All competitors I am tracking are down today with only one exception, me lol I am in the same position as I was yesterday but the biggest volume keywords were targeted and pushed down the serps. Some low volume keywords improved. The algorithms constantly target high volume keywords.”
Tracking tools aren’t showing a ton of volatility, mostly just a shift in the Google search results. Overall, things look pretty calm compared to the update last weekend. Still, we’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Check out the screenshots posted by Search Engine Round Table:
Semrush:
Cognitive SEO:

SERPmetrics:

read more Google Unleashes Huge Algorithm Update September 24th-25th
09/28/2021It’s starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day, because surprise surprise, Google may have rolled out yet another algorithm update last weekend.
According to Search Engine Round Table, the update appears to be pretty big compared to the last one and would have likely begun rolling out on September 24th and ramped up on the 25th. On Sunday the 26th is when things started to cool off a bit.
Evidence of a potential update was confirmed by both tracking tools and chatter within SEO forums.
One comment posted to Google’s Webmaster Help thread stated that:
“My website, which has long had poor rankings at around 18-20, is now dropping like a stone. I looked a few minutes ago and it was position 46 (I’m searching from the UK). Everyone else will probably see it even lower I’d imagine.”
Here are some additional comments pulled from WebmasterWorld:
“Today I had more normal traffic levels, but all of my Australia and Canada traffic is once again down 60%+. Instead among my top referrers today are Nigeria and Pakistan. Nigerian traffic was so high that I blocked the entire country as in my experience it’s nothing good.”
“Sustained drop this past week. Guessing we’ve been hit somehow or it’s something technical our end? Back to 2 years ago numbers.”
“My non-USA (read: non-converting) traffic is very high while USA traffic is lower every day since the 13th…yesterday down 37% and today down 47% at 2:30pm. My most important landing pages are all being hit on a rotating basis, normal one day, dropping by a huge amount the next. My ranking is up one day, down the next but no major moves. The overall effect is not one single new customer inquiry since last Sunday from anywhere in the world.”
Furthermore, here are some screen grabs of tracking tools that track how volatile the Google search results are that were posted by Search Engine Roundtable. Each tracking tool shows massive spikes on the 24th and 25th of September.
Mozcast:

Semrush:

SERPmetrics:

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