As they say- “The best things happen unexpectedly”. And yes, it happened! The unconfirmed, unexpected surprise in a form of major Search ranking update coming out of Google.
Point To Be Noted: This unconfirmed major update resulted in massive rankings shifts in Google’s SERPs, which also meant major increases or decreases for some websites. Overall, it seems to encourage higher-quality and more relevant websites to gain higher visibility in searches.
Hearing The Announcement From The Company: Google seems to have rolled out some ranking algorithm change over the weekend. And that has resulted in a large shift in the rankings of many web sites. To be clear, the company has not yet commented on the speculation around this update or confirmed that an update even occurred.
Changing All The Time: Yes, Google’s search results are changing all the time. Every now and then- new pages come into the index, new signals are being refreshed. Google makes thousands of changes per year. We already know that, but it is not that often that we see such a big spike in both the SEO community chatter and the rank checking tools.
Rank checking tools. Here are some screenshots from the popular rank checking tools. The tool providers said that they do not count user interface changes or the featured snippet deduplication change with their rank changes. So while some suspect the featured snippet deduplication or a user interface change is the result for these tools showing the rank fluctuations, it does not appear this is accurate.
Here is what the tools are showing in terms of how the URLs these track for specific Google queries have changed day-by-day.
As You Can See: Most of these tracking tools are “off the charts.” And this doesn’t mean your site was impacted in a positive or negative way. But a good number of sites were impacted, according to these tools.
Still In Flux: As of now, you may not notice any change for your specific sites. So just keep checking your analytics and narrow it down to your organic Google traffic. If you see big changes, wait it out and keep an eye on it as this update settles.
Why We Care: With most Google updates, especially core updates, there “is no fix” according to Google, the company has given general advice on how to improve your site. The advice is directed to better your web site, so it doesn’t hurt to take a step back, read it, and continue to make your site better every day.
