Google has been busy over the last couple of weeks after being taking a bit of a break with the new years. It seems we are seeing again signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update occurring yesterday and today, January 19th and 20th. And no, these updates are unrelated to crawl spike activity.

There is both SEO industry chatter and data from the tracking tools that support this but yes, we do not have a Google confirmation about an update.

Most recently we had unconfirmed Google search updates on January 14th, 15th and 17th, then before that on January 11th and then it was quiet until some tremors in late December.

SEO Industry Chatter

The chatter is just starting to kick up with renewed discussion at WebmasterWorld starting on January 18th, here are some of the early snippets from that thread related to the recent Google volatility:

One of my sites is about a sport called cricket and today lots of terms popped out of nowhere ranking. Guess which country? Moldova – which has no idea it’s even a sport, most would know it as an animal.

I wonder how long this will last? Good traffic again Tuesday at 131.3% and so far today 87.0%

The sources, queries and paths are all normal but, as yet, not driving many new enquiries however this is not unusual.

All my SERPs look normal.

Massive fluctuations again this morning. In our affiliate niche we have a lot of high DA newspaper and blog sites with ‘Top 10 listings’ outranking dedicated affiliate sites. The Herald, The Scotsman, The Denver Post, The Mercury News all appear. A few previously top 10 sites just been kicked into the long grass – pages 4 and 5. It’s happened before and reverted pretty quickly. But there is no let up in the volatility which has been on going for weeks – since start of December.

Very large increases in traffic across the board for the last two days…yesterday was up 30% and that included USA traffic. My ranking has barely budged though…gained back 4 top3 terms, lost them all the next day. My top3/10 ranking remains at less that half of one year ago. So if rank is not improving, then where is all the traffic suddenly coming from?

Also…a popular arts magazine just published an in depth article about me and it has yet to be indexed 5 days later…nothing. The on-page tags are correct, and the site publishes a lot of very high quality editorial using freelance writers, but it does not get indexed or rank well when it does. It’s mystifying to me…

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On my side, I see drops in the last two days and today the drop is getting even bigger.

I expect to see more chatter from the SEO space as the day goes on…

Google Tracking Tools

Here is what the tracking tools are showing right now:

Semrush:

SERPmetrics:

Cognitive SEO:

RankRanger:

Accuranker:

Algoroo:

Are you folks noticing any big changes for the sites you manage?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.