On Friday afternoon, March 1st, maybe going through Saturday, March 2nd, there may have been yet another Google search ranking algorithm update. We had one on February 27th and February 22nd and now another unconfirmed one on March 2nd. They seem like tremors, maybe tweaks to previous updates. We have both chatter and trackers showing the updates.
To me it seems like tweaks and updates to previous updates from earlier in the week or past couple of weeks. It is hard to say for sure, Google has not confirmed any algorithm updates, I've asked.
Here is what the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has been saying:
biggest hit last night into the day. Refs from google are down by 99%. Seeing it across several domains. And again serps are full of shops that i would trust a penny. If it is this that google tries to compete against amazon, google is lost
Weird situation since last update, rankings have improved but traffic from Google has drastically gone down.
Pretty hard changes today... Fingers crossed that this will roll back...
We have seen some drastic drop in our traffic from last 3 days onwards, I have checked with few of my other websites too, seems something happened from google algo side.
Our traffic is down 5% to 10% since last Saturday. Big media sites are getting multiple listings on the results page (spread out over the page not one after the other). Google Search Widgets like "People Also ask" for some reason getting top billing. Why not show them the search results the person asked for first Google?
I've seen a healthy up-tick since the last update on the 27th Feb. I have been making tweaks to my site for the past few months so hopefully it's a reflection of the work put in.
Here are screen shots from the tracking tools...
But there may be another reason for Moz showing these numbers as Dr. Pete said from Moz:
FYI: Today's 108°F temp. on @mozcast is due to a reversal of yesterday's craziness. Those 19-result SERPs are nowhere to be found in last night's date. Will try to do a full write-up early in the week.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) March 2, 2019
So just be aware... and it may or may not have also influenced the other tracking tools? I've asked them and will update this post if I hear back.
This is one of those rare cases where we could observe the change and reversal, and it seemed too widespread to be a test. I'd be very cautious of any rankings data over the weekend.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) March 4, 2019
But we track a totally diff. data-set than the good Dr.
— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) March 4, 2019
So check your rankings and traffic from Google and see if you noticed any big changes around March 1st and 2nd?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
