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Saturday Weekend Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update

Published

2 years ago

January 17, 2023

Just a couple of days after the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update finished on January 12th, we are now seeing another update, an unconfirmed update that seemed to have hit on Saturday, January 14th.

The chatter began about a day before at WebmasterWorld and the tools, most of them, picked it up the day later. Here is what I am seeing right now.

SEO Chatter

Here are some quotes from the WebmasterWorld forums that started on late Friday and spiked up more on Saturday. There is also a lot of comments on this story with ranking changes.

Something definitely kicked in around 4pm EST yesterday, my traffic literally dropped off a cliff and stayed down the rest of the day. Today traffic seems back to normal but USA is starting the day -45%, but UK is unusually high. At 38% of my total traffic the level of UK traffic makes no sense and is far higher than the ~12%-15% which was the norm for years. I suspect it will crash and go bye bye at some point, but each time it does drop it seems to eventually come back higher.

Mmmm Mmmm Mmmmm. Smells like something’s come out of Aunt Google’s oven. Is that a fresh-baked Core Update I smell? Semrush Sensor smells it. I sure smell it.

Yes, traffic is very low today and SEMrush sent notification that the SERPS seeing big changes. USA is -64%, UK -34%, CA – 56% compared to yesterday. Search is -52%, Direct is -53%. Saturdays tend to be low traffic days so let’s see if it bounces back by end of day.