The automated tracking tools that look for Google search algorithm updates and large ranking changes are going wild over the weekend. I personally think it may be a false alarm. Why? Well, with Google dropping tons of pages from their index by accident, it can cause massive fluctuations in the search results and thus set off these tools.
That is just my gut feeling, I have not confirmed this with any of the tool providers yet. But if pages are dropping out of the Google index and these tools track pages in the Google index, it makes sense. I'll update this story if I get confirmation.
Of course, some webmasters are not happy with this because their pages are not coming up in Google anymore. But hopefully once this is fixed, things will settle back down? We will see.
Here are what the tool providers are showing.
Mozcast:
SEMRush:
Cognitive SEO:
RankRanger:
Accuranker:
Advanced Web Rankings:
Algoroo:
SERPMetrics:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: We have some information from Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz:
No hard evidence either way yet, but a multi-day indexing bug could certainly (in theory) cause the SERP flux we're seeing. While not an "algorithm change" in the traditional sense, it's certainly a ranking change.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) April 8, 2019
