Last week, Tuesday and Wednesday, September 2nd and September 3rd, the Local RankFlux tool showed significant changes to the local rankings in Google Search. But I didn't see much chatter in the local communities. So I asked about it in the Local Search Forum.
First, here is the chart from the tool showing some really big changes on September 2nd and 3rd:
But again, I saw no thread about it in the main local forums. When I started a Local Search Forum thread, Cindy Krum said "Actually yes - We had one client with significant improvements on Thursday, on stuff that has not been touched in a while." But Yan Gilbert said he did notice it but it reverted, he wrote "What I noticed for pretty much everything I checked was that whatever movement there was, was reversed back the next day." He also shared this chart:
So it seems maybe something happened for a 30 hour period or so and then reverted back? It is unclear. But if your analytics for local search looks weird around September 2nd and 3rd, you are not alone.
Meanwhile we are all still waiting for a core update, we did see some limited chatter over the past couple of days but I don't think anything significant happened.
Forum discussion at Local Search Forum.
Stephanie Newton, Content and Community Manager at BrightLocal said "We're currently still sifting through the data but, from what we can see, it looks like the bug was with Google rather than Local RankFlux. It seems that rankings did drop for many people, they just shifted right back the next day (causing the even higher flux). We'll aim to share any more information we have once we've taken a deep-dive into the data, though."
