I am seeing some signs of some big Google Search ranking volatility and shuffling today. The November core update just finished, so Google would say it is not the core update but the November reviews update is still rolling out. Or maybe this new ranking volatility is unrelated to any confirmed update – I don’t know.

Many of the tracking tools spike this morning, which means they are seeing some big ranking volatility this morning. I am also seeing some increased chatter within the SEO community but it is early, so it is limited.

Let’s start with the tools today.

Google Search Volatility Tracking Tools

Semrush:

SimilarWeb:

SERPmetrics:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):

Accuranker:

Mozcast (normally updates later today):

Algoroo:

SERPstat:

Wincher:

So most of the tools are showing big changes in the Google Search results.

SEO Chatter

Here is the chatter I am seeing within the SEO community from this site and WebmasterWorld:

Very slow today…

Some wild Ride traffic-wise started the last hours.
I am getting bursts of traffic for a short period of time that makes the gained
traffic while the core update is running return again.
Appears like a fight of Google core algorithm and other ongoing algorithms is going on
and from time to time, some algorithm fires and activates and takes over
and returns the traffic, while other times, another algorithm takes control and smashes the traffic back to low and renders the Google core algorithm useless.
It’s heavy volatile.

and just as the update finished, the results are shuffled again. It’s so disgusting at this point.

I feel like the “December” update has already begun…

Our UK traffic and conversions plummeted within hours of the update finishing.

Yeah we took a big downturn last week, but thought it was Google Manipulation for Black Friday.

But since the update finished, it feels like our sites are offline, especially today.

What are you all seeing?

Is this the end of the reviews update or something new?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

After just under 26 days, the Google November 2023 core update is finally done rolling out. It took almost two weeks longer to roll out than the average core update and rolled out during the huge shopping days on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also overlapping the November 2023 reviews update. So it was a big deal.

Google posted the update was done at 11:32 am ET on November 28, 2023, after it started rolling out on November 2, 2023 at 3:09 PM ET.

This is the longest documented core update rollout, the previous longest core update rollout went to the August 2023 core update took 16 days, this one was 10 days longer. It wasn’t as long as most SEOs thought it would take, but it was the longest rollout of a core update. It was not the longest update in general, the December 2022 helpful content update took 38 days to roll out but it was the longest core update roll out in history.

As a reminder, the October 2023 core update started on October 5, 2023 and completed on October 19, 2023, completing two weeks prior to this November core update rolled out.

Here are the posts on the release times:

The roll-out of the November core update is now complete.https://t.co/geIJA2Bg8g

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 28, 2023

Documented Volatility For November 2023 Core Update

This update kicked off quickly and was super volatile early on. The chatter within the SEO community was pretty heated throughout – even during the Thanksgiving holiday break. The tools themselves seemed to calm down, even with the reviews update rolling out the following week.

There was some additional chatter in the past 24 hours about massive volatility but the tools are not picking that up and the chatter was not that insane.

The tools themselves shows volatility from November 2nd through November 17th or so. More on that later.

Google November 2023 Core Update Quick Facts:

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

• Name: Google November 2023 Broad Core Update
• Launched: November 2, 2023 at around 3 pm ET
• Rollout: Finished on November 28, 2023 at around 11:30 am ET
• Targets: It looks at all types of content
• Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
• Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
• Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but so far, this seems to be a typical core update that reaches wide and the impact is fast.
• Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
• Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
• Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

Overlapping Updates: November Core & November Reviews Updates

Unlike with the October core update, we had the October 2023 spam update roll out, where Google said if you are not spamming then you weren’t hit by the spam update, you were hit by the core update.

With a reviews update and a core update, that is a bit harder for Google to say. They are similar updates that can impact similar sites. So there was for sure some confusion between the two. It would be hard to know for sure if your site was hit by the November core update versus the November reviews update unless your site got hit in the first batch of the core update volatility before the reviews update touched down.

Google Tracking Tools On November 2023 Core Update:

Here is what the tools showed over the past month or so with this core and reviews update rollout:

Semrush:

SERPmetrics:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

Mozcast:

Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):

Algoroo:

SimilarWeb:

SERPstat:

Wincher:

Mangools:

Previous Broad Core Updates

Here is a list of the most recent core updates we’ve seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.

• November 2023 Core Update: November 2, 2023 through November 28, 2023
• October 2023 Core Update: October 5, 2023 through October 19, 2023
• August 2023 Core Update: August 22, 2023 through September 7, 2023
• March 2023 Core Update: March 15, 2023 through March 28, 2023
• September 2022 Core Update: September 12, 2022 through September 26, 2022
• May 2022 Core Update: May 25, 2022 through June 9, 2022
• November 2021 Core Update: November 17, 2021 through November 30, 2021
• July 2021 Core Update: July 1, 2021 through July 12, 2021
• June 2021 Core Update: June 2, 2021 through June 12, 2021
• December 2020 Core Update: December 3, 2020 through December 16, 2020
• May 2020 Core Update: May 4, 2020 through May 18, 2020
• January 2020 Core Update: January 13, 2020 through mostly January 17, 2020
• September 2019 Core Update: September 24, 2019
• Google June 2019 Core Update: June 3, 2019 through June 8, 2019

How did you all do? Hope it wasn’t too bad?

Forum discussion at X and WebmasterWorld.

Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft shared how often the different modes in Microsoft Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, are used. There is Balanced mode, creative mode and precise mode. Balanced mode gets 60-70% of the usages, whereas the other two modes get about 15% each.

Mikhail wrote on X, “Balanced is the most popular, maybe 60-70% of the people (it is the fastest and the default). Creative and Precise are 15%-ish each.”

Here are those posts:

I thought creative mode would get more usage than precise mode because of the image generation aspect but I guess I was wrong.

To learn more about these chat modes, read this story.

Forum discussion at X.