Another Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On October 28th?

Some SEOs are noticing a possible Google search ranking algorithm update on or around October 28th where sites hit by the unconfirmed October 13ish update and even the October spam update (amongst others) are noticing big swings the other way in terms of their Google rankings and traffic.

Glenn Gabe shared a number of charts on Twitter documenting some large publishers based in the United Kingdom and beyond that showed big swings on October 28th, after being hit by previous updates. Here are those charts:

And here are some other sites seeing a lot of movement based on the 10/28 update. They were also heavily impacted by the September broad core update. I’m still digging in, but again, a BIG heads-up that something rolled out 10/28 that looks significant. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/TbG7gUs8Vr

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 31, 2022

And now I’m hearing from some impacted by the October Spam Update that are seeing reversals. Here is a site first impacted by the Sep broad core update, then tanked w/the spam update, but then started to recover with the 10/28 update. This is crazy stuff… pic.twitter.com/6z0KDbPPiV

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 31, 2022

Other SEOs also noted:

Yes if you’re OK with anonymised screenshots: pic.twitter.com/NVNdGlroux

— Barry Adams 📰 (@badams) October 31, 2022

Advertisement

Yeah I also notice a partial recovery for some French publishers.

— Kevin Monier (@Kevin_Monier) October 31, 2022

Seeing the same. Huge fluctuations https://t.co/3G2fM48tWF

— Taylor Kurtz (@RealTaylorKurtz) October 31, 2022

WSJ, CNN and Bloomberg, which all saw big declines during the Sept Core Update, appear to be bouncing back within the last few days. pic.twitter.com/1hXylwn7fd

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) October 31, 2022

The weird thing is that the overall chatter within the SEO community around October 28th was pretty light. I saw one mention of an update on October 28th in the WebmasterWorld forums and that is it. That SEO said “I saw some changes as well on the 28th, let’s wait a few days to see how it moves. It’s Halloween, so change of user behaviour.” You can tell by how they wrote behavior that they are based in the UK region. While a different WebmasterWorld thread has an SEO saying “After 40 days of torturous nonstop decline my oldest site suddenly showed some recovery today. It may be a temporary technical phenomenon and it may continue to slide for another month or forever. But the magnitude and instantaneous nature of this uptick is really stunning (for the size of the site). It erased 2 weeks of declines instantly.” Someone replied to that post agreeing, saying, “whatever Google released around 10/14 or 10/13 was seemingly reverted yesterday 10/29.” Another posted later Monday, “We had a decline on Friday and a very very big hit on Sunday. And today is worse.”

In the comments area here, there are some talking about changes around October 28th, for example, one said that he “lost traffic almost 90%, now my pages are not indexing with no reason. it’s been 3 days now.”

What about the tools?

RankRanger showed the most volatility on mobile out of all the tools on that date:

Mozcast was showing pretty warm weather:

Semrush showed a small spike on that date, note switching it to just UK results didn’t make it any more volatile:

SERPmetrics shows a blip:

Algoroo is calm:

Advanced Web Rankings spiked up a bit on the 28th but not huge:

Accuranker was calm:

CognitiveSEO was calm on October 28th:

SERPwoo shows more on that date:

So did any of you see anything on October 28th? Can you share?

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.