Last Thursday, April 16th (the last day of Passover) there may have been a Google search ranking update. There was 100% chatter and some of the rank checking tools notices blips in changes on that day. Google has not confirmed any update but there may have been a small one.
Here is some of the chatter from WebmasterWorld:
Anyone else see a down swing in organic traffic yesterday from Google?After falling a good 40% in organic traffic since February we had started to rise a bit over the last week and a half but yesterday traffic dropped again.
I've started to see changes in ranking today for page 1s - traffic may have slowed a little too. There is some volatility picked up in semrush.com/sensor/ as well.
But -- we're also seeing a lot of our tail query pages suddenly popping with consistent traffic. It's as if suddenly google has given our entire site a boost.
Agreed, when I see a burst, it's typically traffic coming from old long tail searches or sub pages rather than via the home page. In my case, every query usually takes me just to the home page, with only a few other pages getting their own search result. When it opens up, I am suddenly getting a wider range of pages, very temporarily, in the SERP's. Focus is immensely better in those searches. 20 year old site here. I fondly remember unfettered traffic.
I have to say, the chatter in the SEO forums over the past month is slower than normal. Just might be an impact of the COVID-19 situation, where working from home leaves less time for forums?
Here are the tracking tools, notice the date around April 16th:
Did you notice any changes to your Google rankings and traffic this past Thursday or so?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
