While I highly doubt Google pushed an algorithmic change over Memorial Day, there was a significant spike in chatter in the SEO community and the third-party Google Search tracking tools are showing volatility. Yes, traffic can be weird and lower on Memorial Day – I get that – but there seems to be more movement than normal.

So, was there a Google Search ranking update over Memorial Day weekend? Let me share what I am seeing but before I do.

Just a reminder that we saw Google ranking volatility around May 22nd, May 16th, May 9th, May 3rd and April 25th. Before that the March 2024 core update started on March 5th and ended on April 19th, 45 days later. It has been a busy month.

SEO Chatter

I began seeing chatter at WebmasterWorld on Sunday, May 26th and the chatter continued on through yesterday. Here is some of what was said in the forums:

Wow, I am seeing a 70% drop in traffic to my site’s homepage this weekend. Now a drop is normal on holiday weekends, but certainly not 70%….what’s up with that?

Very poor weekend for my global site at 60% yesterday and so far today after 20 hours at 40%. I expect tomorrow to be equally low.

UK hotel site ended up yesterday after a very slow start and has been extremely busy today as hoped for with food and live music.

What a strange weekend. Saturday traffic from Google collapsed, Sunday a strong increase, today so far 1 hour a lot of traffic, one hour as good as nothing, this has been going on since 6 am. I give up trying to understand that.

For me too, a little bit down again at the weekend. It goes down, down and down. Nobody knows why or why. I’m slowly but surely coming to terms with the fact that this topic no longer has a future. 🙁

Oh wow, there is life after Google. My traffic overnight is +140%. Bringing me back to, almost, where I was. I think a few new articles went viral but Google, was -20%. So none of this increased traffic was sent from them. Nice! After months and weeks of solid decline I now see an increase. Now to try and maintain it.

Traffic back to normal for me today which surprised me a little.

It is a holiday weekend in the UK therefore I went out for a few beers last night and it really did shock me. Several pubs were already closed and the normally really busy pubs were all absolutely dead … Were all the supposed 20 million car journeys happening last night?

I also saw some chatter on this site:

I thought Google would leave it alone on memorial day but seems there is now shuffling in my niche anyway. It was actually awfully quiet for a few days with pretty much no changes in the rankings. But it’s starting again. It’s just sick. I don’t get why the rankings shuffle so much day to day. I have read the theories here and they seem correct. Could be A/B testing. Who even knows.

Someone is feeling a difference during this weekend?

Glenn Gabe also spotted changes, he wrote, “Well, add 5/26 to the list. I’m seeing some confirmed surges in rankings across sites I have access to. And these are sites also impacted by the March core update.”

So, we’ve seen some crazy volatility after the March core update rolled out. E.g. The 5/3 movement was huge and we saw a number of sites completely recover from the March core update. But then there was a ton of volatility on 5/6, 5/8, 5/11, and 5/22. Well, add 5/26 to the list.… pic.twitter.com/CRlTH9Ap7Z

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 27, 2024

And more:

hi @rustybrick, Any noise about google update. Results are fluctuation a lot here in India

— Dinesh Singh (@kumarsinghdk) May 27, 2024

Google Tracking Tools

As you can see, most of these tools have been super heated and showing a lot of Google ranking volatility over the past week.

Semrush:

SimilarWeb:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Mozcast:

SERPmetrics:

Accuranker:

Mangools:

Wincher:

SERPstat:

Cognitive SEO:

Algoroo:

What did you all see this weekend?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has once again said that its enforcement of the site reputation abuse policy is still only being done through manual actions and not algorithmically. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liasion, said this on X yesterday, “We have not gone live with algorithmic actions on site reputation abuse.”

Sullivan added that “when we do, we’ll be very clear about that.” Meaning, when Google starts to enforce the site reputation abuse policy through algorithmic means, Google will announce it somewhere. Likely on the its search status page.

As a reminder, Sullivan said this on May 6th on X, as we covered back then. He wrote then, “we’re only doing manual actions right now. The algorithmic component will indeed come, as we’ve said, but that’s not live yet.” So the algorithmic component 18 days later is still not live.

Sullivan added:

Publishers seeing changes and thinking it’s this — it’s not — results change all the time for all types of reasons. The actions currently only also impact the content being actions, not the entire site, as the action notices I believe make clear.

This was in response to some SEOs saying that the site reputation abuse policy is algorithmic now. Google is saying no, it is not.

Here is that post:

We have not gone live with algorithmic actions on site reputation abuse. I well imagine when we do, we’ll be very clear about that. Publishers seeing changes and thinking it’s this — it’s not — results change all the time for all types of reasons. The actions currently only…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 23, 2024

Google did say the site reputation abuse policy would be enforced both algorithmically and through manual actions but when it first went live, it was only enforced using manual actions.

As a reminder, site reputation abuse “is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals,” Chris Nelson from the Google Search Quality team wrote. This includes sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site’s main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users, he explained.

Here is more commentary on this topic from yesterday:

I don’t know what that chart is based on. Third-party visibility stats? Or is this data from each site reported directly from Search Console? But beyond that, again, we’ve not added an algorithmic component for site reputation abuse. What I said in my original response is still…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 23, 2024

Yes, that’s entirely coincidental. We’ve only taken manual actions.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 23, 2024

Thank you. It definitely has not rolled out.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 23, 2024

It’s not an update. It was a new spam policy that came into effect as of that day. We began manual actions the next day. We’re only doing manual actions on this, at the moment.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 23, 2024

I should add, there is a lot of confusion around a lof of the ranking volatility over the past few weeks. There was a lot of unconfirmed Google updates in the past few weeks that really shuffled things around in the Google search results.

Forum discussion at X.

We had more Google search ranking volatility in the middle of the week after some calming for a few days. Google Ads will soon show within the Google AI Overview, plus we covered a lot more ad news. Sundar Pichai was interviewed, and we broke it down. Bing lets you turn off its AI Copilot answers in the search results, but Google still does not. There are many poor-quality AI Overviews, and now there is a way to find a lot of them. Google said it is working on surfacing more heartfelt, helpful content in Search. Google is testing a special snippet treatment for Reddit. Google Search Console is showing a weird surge in the search performance reports for product snippets. Google and Bing recommend you upgrade to WordPress 6.5 because it supports lastmod dates in sitemaps. Google’s site reputation abuse policy enforcement is still not algorithmic. Google Lens now shows richer and links to sites. Google added more visual knowledge panel source information. Google can now index epub formats. Bing went down this week, taking down ChatGPT search, DuckDuckGo, Copilot, and more services. Bing is testing tags filters in its search results. Apple Maps can permanently close a business if the hours and address are missing or don’t match. GA4 real-time reports now show users in the last 5 minutes. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week’s video recap is sponsored by Duda, the Professional Website Builder You Can Call Your Own.

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