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Trust me, I am even getting tired of reporting on Google search algorithm updates - we've had so many but there are numerous signs of another update. One that touched down yesterday late morning, October 16th.
Most, not all, but most of the automated tracking tools are showing signs of the update and there is some chatter in the SEO communities around an update. I will ask Google about this update but they probably will reference their update on updates post for me.
Here is some of the chatter from WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World:
Many of the keywords get new positions. I'm sure there is something happening.SEMRush is showing 9.4 and Rank Ranger is showing high volatility...
Yes, my rankings for some of my high volume keywords have slipped again in the last couple of days - and I had only just got them back! I’m seeing some evidence of a further push towards big brand authority sites. A high umbrella relevance low authority niche site got pushed down on some of the high volume searches in favour of slick corporate sites from outside the niche.
Seeing a big shakeup in the SERPs for our industry today. Some up, some down for us personally. Still very early in the US but traffic seems to be a bit lower than last week.
Yep - volatile today!
Big ranking changes today in Europe.
Some movement in our niche too - nothing TOO dramatic, but certainly more than the daily push'n'shove that one would expect.
Yup Im noticing a lot of volatility on my PBN these last few days
Here are some tweets:
@rustybrick I guess an #Googleupdate is brewing up right now. See.. pic.twitter.com/8hzcLkGoBA
— Anil (@lalitanil) October 16, 2018
@rustybrick I see a lot of changes in the SERP. @semrush Sensor confirms the same. Signs of a major update?
— Aquif Shaikh (@aquifz) October 16, 2018
Anyone seeing any ranking flux this morning? @rustybrick anything? @SEMrush Sensor tool seeing some major turbulence across US mobile and Desktop. Affecting multiple industries. Haven't checked the sites yet, but need to buckle down again! Google just won't give us a break! #SEO pic.twitter.com/HGZ6S5Yi7k
— Rob May (@robinlmay) October 16, 2018
Here is what the tracking tools are showing, like I said, many are off the charts, some are just showing high changes and some nothing.
Are you noticing ranking changes and shifts for your web sites? Let us know.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
Comments:
Shani Mosta
10/17/2018 01:13 pm
The big G is taking keywords download, there are no guidelines by Google on any changes or chatters about what's wrong and why sites are dropping like rain. Its helpless seeing sites fall one after another keyword and even after sites having no useless backlinks to refer and good quality content and everything updated and latest as per industry requirements and standards. Can't even imagine what's going on and what's wrong what to improve to regain positions. From 300~500 real time user we are now at 40 - 60 real time user after yesterday update, in 1st week of October update we were 100 - 150 real time user. There are no markups for anything at all, We have 0 error pages, AMP pages, high end page loading to load page in less than 2 seconds with normal content with images.
Greg
10/17/2018 01:28 pm
But maybe your content sucks. When you list all the technical reasons you should rank but leave out all the content ones it feels like you're missing the point on why your site took a hit.
Forthrightt
10/17/2018 01:58 pm
Definitely see some abnormal traffic fluctuations and low conversion rates the past 24hrs. Today, the first day after the update needs to be looked at carefully. Always wait for the dust to settle before coming to any conclusions.
snuffy
10/17/2018 02:12 pm
I don't think that these recent rumblings are "updates". I think that these are "The New Google".
@Michael_Martinez
10/17/2018 03:02 pm
Yes. I rather suspect the neural matching algorithms are adjusting things as the Web changes, even though they only affect about 30% of queries. And we don't know what else Google has changed under the hood but it's unlikely they are making huge "core algorithm" updates this frequently.
Ivano Di Biasi
10/17/2018 05:03 pm
Same situation in Italy https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/55b2fa9d8665ecd8b8e0ef46e78a7777e49034dc4aca674e84d613e317f708b3.png
straw_maggie
10/17/2018 05:17 pm
Neural matching lol , i am a data scientist and i can't stop laughing. hahah neural matching . We call it Neural networks .
Stupid Intelligent
10/17/2018 06:35 pm
Whatever you wrote your last para aren't ranking factors at all.
@Michael_Martinez
10/17/2018 07:10 pm
Yeah, everyone is a data scientist these days. Back when we dinosaurs were cutting the code we were just programmers writing analysis software. We used arrays instead of all these fancy vectors and stuff. But Google made the "we've been using neural matching for the past few months" announcement, so I guess they wanted everyone to have a jolly good time.
peppy
10/17/2018 08:49 pm
This was a very annoying update. For one day (October 15th), traffic recovered to pre-9/11 levels, had me thinking the site finally recovered. The next day (October 16th), traffic was even lower than before.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/17/2018 09:30 pm
How to check if Google released latest improvement of it's algorithm: 1. Google any keyword. 2. If results became worse than before, the "improvement" has happened! I've ranked for more than a year for keyword "mango benefits" with huge article (6000 words) that covered this subject in great detail and all claims were supported by links to scientific journals. Now I don't rank for that keyword at all and most of the results are short, low-quality articles that were supposed not to rank since Panda. My all time favorite example of these low quality results is 400 words piece from Nigerian "The Guardian". AWESOME job, Google! /s
Stupid Intelligent
10/17/2018 09:31 pm
That nigerian article gives me the exact information I want. Quick and informative.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/17/2018 09:34 pm
I thought articles like these were considered low quality by Panda... If this is what Google wants, they should stop pretending that they prefer experts who write high-quality articles. Just poop out a short summary of good article and Google will make it rank. Nobody needs long form content, right?
Stupid Intelligent
10/17/2018 09:35 pm
As a user, I don't care about long or short form. I need quick answer within secs to what I'm looking for. I got no time to read 6000 to 10000 words. That notion is ridiculous to begin with.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/17/2018 09:37 pm
Well, you can't have it both... Either Panda was a mistake or whatever is going right now is a mistake. I agree that not many people want to read 6000 words research piece. But I bet there are better ways to address it than to just completely drop high-quality sites.
Stupid Intelligent
10/17/2018 09:38 pm
Good luck bro.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/17/2018 10:19 pm
Barry, could you ask Google if it is OK to write content that used to be penalized by Panda? It seems like such content is outranking long, extensive guides now. If we can reverse back to pre-Panda times without any penalties, it would be nice to know.
Barry Schwartz
10/17/2018 10:20 pm
Google won’t tell me that.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/17/2018 10:20 pm
Same thing happened to my site in August and September. Major improvement one day and next day -70%.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/17/2018 10:29 pm
Someone needs to square this circle. Google says that we need to continue producing high-quality content but it is being outranked by low quality, short content. I don't want to write sub-par, short content because I don't want Panda penalty. Either short content shouldn't outrank long content, or they should just admin that it is OK to ignore Panda guidelines. I understand that there are many other factors that affect rankings, but they can't say "Keep doing what you are doing" when what we are doing is obviously not working... It is really frustrating when you put in so much time, effort and money to see that what they tell you to do is wrong.
Harry Zallen
10/17/2018 10:35 pm
"...there are no guidelines by Google on any changes or chatters about what's wrong and why sites are dropping like rain." There is a guideline. See the Search Quality Raters Guidelines. And chatter. Checkout WebmasterWorld. Good luck.
Rusbell Madrigal
10/18/2018 12:30 am
Google update are gonna kill me...
massimodefilippo
10/18/2018 05:49 am
Ok, but in the pages there are indexes and paragraph titles, so you can skip to what you want in 5 seconds. if it is too much, we will have a serp with only dictionaries!
massimodefilippo
10/18/2018 05:53 am
Everyday worse, it looks google does experiment on websites everyday. Many websites gain 400% and after 2 months they lose 50/70%. The intent of the customer change so fastly!??!?!?! The value of the websites change so suddendly!!!??!?!?!? Many websites without EAT goes up, only because they have many pages. Oh, someone saw pharmaceutical companies going down?!?!??!
Harish yadav
10/18/2018 06:20 am
There are around 7-8 minor and huge core updates in Google Algorithm in last 2 months. And I hope this will help most of us. https://youtu.be/lekpRrnm4QY
Luca
10/18/2018 08:04 am
ok... We'll wait for these waves...
Godfather
10/18/2018 08:10 am
Panda kicks for spinned content. Thin = spinned.
iMoneySlots
10/18/2018 08:37 am
something happens to my site and I think it was new google algorythm
Ritesh Singh
10/18/2018 09:19 am
Hi Barry, I have seen some changes in ranking of my websites in Google SERP. Target- country United Kingdom. Do you have any updates?
Ritesh Singh
10/18/2018 09:26 am
United Kingdom SERP volatility right now https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/99162591b4ef99fcfd7f362d39b7a9072fb57bef825ca8f30cd5c9c069017245.png
Shani Mosta
10/18/2018 11:01 am
i agree with that. One side its about high quality detailed content that google want for users now at another hand Google want short precise content? what exactly is the requirement for real SEO according to Google, or SEO is really gonna be dead by 2018?
Shani Mosta
10/18/2018 11:08 am
I understand and that can be a call, to be true we ranked for keywords for more than a year and yes we collected users feedback, used hotjar and other tools to analyse audience interaction with page, kept on improving information time to time with latest updates and information. Improved content and grammar mistakes as per users feedback and other tools like grammary even after experts cross check content multiple times after writing it up. So yea the content had quality, we understand the value of content and as we have content based website we want user to read only authentic information which is relevant to them and nothing else on the screens while scrolling or reading even in sidebar only we use relevant content to that post which is being read by user. Eitherway, every writer has its own writing skills and that can't be judge according to me as in every language the meaning for a similar sentence will be same, the writing pattern was even judged by us by our many competing sites so that we stay in competition in reading score and what kind of content users like. With heatmaps and polls on page, we saw more than 85% users like the content, which i guess is a good score because not everyone is satisfied ever even with the official sources. There is something being on-going under the hood.
Shani Mosta
10/18/2018 11:10 am
These days i don't see anything coming under guidelines, either Google alogs are un-stable or they are really experimenting something big under the hood and not even speaking a bit on it. One day up and second day completely down is not a matter of any guidelines i assume.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/18/2018 11:22 am
It was very hard to rank short pages (100-500 words) since Panda. Now SERP is full of them. Kind of goes against "make the web better" stuff that Google has been always saying to content creators.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/18/2018 11:28 am
Exactly, properly formatted article will answer multiple questions and Google had no issues displaying it in SERP. According to GWT, Google ranked many small sub-sections of my pages, like example.com/article-1#topic-1
Marek M.
10/18/2018 12:00 pm
They are all drunk in Google
RSoft
10/18/2018 12:04 pm
Superb you did a great job, thanks a lot for sharing this Article...
Alvin Lau
10/18/2018 12:32 pm
Mine dropped today..
McRobieAdams
10/18/2018 12:36 pm
Someone please help me to understand that what update is exactly happened
sergei
10/18/2018 01:02 pm
Yep! New algorithm "dRunkBrain" is coming up! SERP is going down, but Google doesn't care. Adwords PPC is going up and up. Instead of commercial websites we get old blogs, Quora and other shit.
Stupid Intelligent
10/18/2018 01:06 pm
EAT isn't a ranking factor at all.
PhysicsForums.com
10/18/2018 01:42 pm
I had rank drops in 4/6 sites today
Stupid Intelligent
10/18/2018 02:13 pm
Spinned content is not what Panda is about. Thin content is not what you wrote it is.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/18/2018 02:51 pm
Who knew that Google doesn't like long, extensive content. If you want to rank after these "improvements", I guess you just need to create a 50 word thread on well-established forum...
Sergey Lucktinov
10/18/2018 03:16 pm
LOL, it is right there in Google TOS. Gee, some "experts" here need to stop posting nonsense...
Stupid Intelligent
10/18/2018 03:18 pm
EAT isn't a ranking factor. Google guidelines aren't ranking factors either.
Sergey Lucktinov
10/18/2018 03:20 pm
If it is not, then why is it included in ranking factors? Here , read some info and stop looking stupid - http://prntscr.com/l7la2o
Stupid Intelligent
10/18/2018 03:27 pm
Again, like written before, neither is EAT or Google's guidelines ranking factors.
Darby Ellis
10/18/2018 03:57 pm
You know, perhaps part of Google's learning AI is to give a bunch of different sites a chance to rank at some point and see how the users interact to truly determine what people are looking for when it comes to content? Perhaps it's not just about random tweaks, but really testing for the future of true predictability regarding content and what the public truly wants/resonates with. That's why Google says to keep working on bettering your content and saying that there's nothing really to do when a new change hits. It's all speculation on my part, but I could see this being what they're after based on how their SERP features are always changing to introduce new ways of discovering things (shopping, images, videos, news, etc).
Darby Ellis
10/18/2018 03:59 pm
EAT itself isn't, but the what Google uses to determine what makes up EAT is. So, in a way, EAT is a ranking factor but not at face value.
sergei
10/18/2018 04:12 pm
Or they could just f#ck up the algorithm without any plan. Or they trying to make some moth@#$cking money for their bosses.
mian-tian
10/18/2018 04:19 pm
Or perhaps the AI is training itself how to earn the most money for Google, by making searchers click on ads.
massimodefilippo
10/18/2018 10:05 pm
Yes, looks experiment because I see many websites doing +400% and after 2 months they did -50%. And even websites who did -90% after they recover almost all the traffic!
Mirza Atif
10/19/2018 09:24 am
Definitely an update. but this time some Tricky stuff happened too.
Sparx BPO
10/19/2018 09:42 am
my some of keywords lost their position since last 2 days.
what's up?
10/19/2018 11:07 am
Page 1 rankings yet ZERO traffic from Google? Doesn't make any sense any more. Well, it hasn't made any sense since August.
SheetLabels
10/19/2018 02:30 pm
Been wondering the same thing, basic a/b testing? If they don't provide quality people may start searching elsewhere.
Độc Cô Khách
10/20/2018 02:43 am
Many page index change
Ahmad Raj
10/20/2018 04:18 am
Google has making big crap since fred update, now more crap every month and makes no sense. It is not better but going worse and worst. Well.. the serp result contains many unfair position. Page index also going crap. Google please make next name is Google Crap Update!
phoolchand yadav
10/20/2018 06:43 am
That update effect my pages indexing, some pages already good rank, now missing from Indexing.
SearchLight
10/20/2018 08:13 am
Bleah! Yet another failed update. I don't understand what is the reason for these updates..It's not better search results because I see spammy sites rise up on our niche...
Özgür Nevres
10/20/2018 01:17 pm
This update has been rolled back on October 19.
Steve Parkinson
10/20/2018 03:34 pm
Hi community, I used to use the Firefox, then Google chrome SERPTrends extension to monitor Google SER results (numbered positions). Now that doesn't work, recently. The last time it worked was 11th Oct 2018 (for me at least). Is there another tool out there that doesn't cost the earth (Free is ideal) that I can use to monitor the position of a website against a search phrase? Thanks for your help guys.
Steve Parkinson
10/20/2018 03:36 pm
I am using Bing more often than I used to...
mak
10/20/2018 05:23 pm
we have domain in health sector ( https://www.consumerhealthdigest.com/ ) with lot high quality content, what ever published get ranked , we were dominating sector from last 5 year and all of sudden Aug 50% drop Oct another 50% drop and from 100K day to 25k day..... First drop of traffic is august was mainly because of google search template, google having more paid site and more and more spam, low quality, short contain site came up......... no place for good site in organic, google just filling there pocket that's all....... They have killed many organization who running business in right way........ From last 2 days Site Traffic having huge fluctuation from almost 10-90%, Still its keep happening no clue.... Any Expert Comment and Suggestion please....????
Ahmad Raj
10/21/2018 08:58 am
It's not only you brother, we can't trust google right now. Google is going crazy insane, the SERP result completely unfair anyway, good original content got kicked while spam get over index. Google also give these spammer good rank! Now we know why Google never open abouth his algorythm, he is trying to hang his own neck.
Sanjay
10/21/2018 09:13 am
No change in SERPs but 50% drop in traffic since Oct 16th update. Anyone can help me understand what's going on and what can i do?
Jose María
10/21/2018 09:48 pm
It is clear and evident that the SERP is getting worst since the last August. Too many spamy sites are arising on the SERPs while a lot of quality sites are getting a penalty. I don't think that Google is going crazy, just I am thinking that the responsable of that are doing shit in his job. So I think that somebody should be fired from Google... Anyway, Google never will admit this mistake. But I think that it would be much better for everyone if Google fix it ASAP
Jim Steller
10/21/2018 10:35 pm
LOL! Google does this to get more "Google Ad$":
Richard Christofferson
10/22/2018 05:01 am
Google will never admit this is a very poor attempt at more money grubbing from small-mid size publishers. Too bad they are never going to get another cent of millions I've generated for them in revenue. Ever since the "zombie traffic" phenomena, Facebook and other ad networks have paid off far better than using adwords ever will. They made the platform look ridiculous to confuse people into spending more money than they need to. This update slapped good quality sites and replaced them with a bunch of useless spammy and thin articles, there is no way this is an improvement over the last few months. I have been using Bing and DDG to answer my queries much quicker over the last few weeks too, I suggest others do the same. Stop feeding the machine,
Karin Foster
10/22/2018 07:40 am
Yeah, you never know what to expect from it.
Karin Foster
10/22/2018 07:49 am
Happy to admit that this update did not affect the websites unlike the previous one when rankings got worse. We all definitely need a clear & working action plan to prevent these ranking fluctuations after each G update.
Ozair Akhtar
10/22/2018 11:28 am
I have started observing the effect of Google Updates on the search results over Google.com.pk and also I have seen that it really effects the ranking of local CTLDs ".pk - domain names". Can anyone confirm the fact that ".pk - domains" also get penalized due to spam?
shaana
10/23/2018 11:23 am
did you make any specific updates to your site this year which could be a factor for back to back traffic loss in 2nd half of 2018? From 100K to 25k is too harsh. There has to be some major factor for it.
Troy Sawyer
10/25/2018 03:36 am
That Nigerian article is a joke. C'mon Stupid Intelligent? Pure jibberish. Google has lost the plot.
Vijay Hackr
10/25/2018 04:02 am
It's better for user as well.
Jéssica Salles
10/25/2018 08:28 pm
Updates in several segments and the highly volatile sensor. :( #fear
sanusense
10/28/2018 12:59 am
Exact thing happened to one of my health site as well. It was getting 5-6k/daily visitors then reduced to 1k and after Oct 2018 is gone worse. No matter how much quality you serve, they won't rank you up. Only thing I noticed that Big sites such as GQ and Elle are getting better placement. Clearly, it shows that small business owners have to suffer. Future is tough for small or mid sized publishers.
Afro Houseza
11/06/2018 03:57 pm
my music website https://hiphopza.com ranking dropped slightly