Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On April 20th & 21st

Google again seemed to have pushed out another Google search ranking algorithm update on April 20th and April 21st. It might be a continuation from the April 18th update, just now rolling out more, or it might be its own thing. Google has not confirmed an update is officially rolling out.

But the chatter is super hot right now and the tracking tools are showing big volatility on April 20, 2022 through April 21, 2022.

The last confirmed update was the March 2022 Product Reviews Update and that just ended on April 11th. The most recent unconfirmed update was on April 18th then followed by April 13th and 14th and another update on March 18th both did not get confirmed by Google. Also one on March 11th and March 4th.

So what are we seeing?

SEO Chatter

The SEO community chatter on WebmasterWorld is heating up, some also on social media. Here are quotes from that thread:

Seems that there are loads of changes going through Google at the moment. Is anyone seeing better results? I’m actually noticing less spam.

I’m seeing big swings from day to day…days where USA traffic is down the entire day and it’s very targeted to my home page and my most important landing pages. The other day my home page and my three most important landing pages were all down exactly 55%. The next day a big surge, but the surge is mostly bots which are not being weeded out, and today it is a surge in Chinese, Indian and Bangla traffic.

Google is clearly rolling out the new overstuffed page layouts for more and more searches in USA (and I suspect UK as well) so Good quality traffic is in very short supply. I have had the worst start to the year by far since 2009 (after the financial crash)…even Q1 2020 was better than Q1 2022. So either rising inflation and the war have scared my customers away in every single country I sell to, OR Google has simply destroyed my business…or both are working in tandem.

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Wow super low traffic still,also I checked my google search console and my google news visits are only 10 clicks with 300 views and I post regular articles daily and news updates.

UK Sensors through the roof, looks like more change is coming. Shame because as I reported earlier I thought search was looking better. Guess we’ll wait and see…

There is more chatter, that is just a sampling…

Google Tracking Tools

Many of the automated tracking tools are showing big changes.

Semrush:

RankRanger:

Mozcast:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Cognitive SEO:

Accuranker:

SERPmetrics:

So there seems to have been big Google search ranking swings in the past couple of days. Have you noticed?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.