There is some chatter and some signs that there may have been a disturbance to the Google search ranking algorithm on October 28th. The chatter is not as high as a core update or a large update but both the chatter is higher than normal and there are some tools that show there may have been an update a couple of days ago.
If you look at the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread, you will see starting early morning of October 28th the chatter began. Here are some quotes of complaints around ranking changes:
traffic significantly down... anyone experiencing the same thing.. google is driving traffic to old and less popular pages
I think we need to wait out until the election is over. Traffic down as well + it seems like Google doing some adjustments and every time they doing up my site goes DOWN while "Pinterest" type of sites (high authority) goes UP. It might be that they adjusting this to avoid any trash news concerning election.
Yes, if you page back - this has been happening for us for almost a week now. It is maddening. The SERPS are a complete mess.
Both traffic and conversions have been way down for the last couple of days. Some weird page like Youtube came up as well... ads are pushing the results down.. This is just a mess...
I see big changes in Norway for casino keywords and some spammy affiliate sites ranking high in Norway. This casino affiliate sites ranking high in Norway I see much bad content (written long just for Google and stuffed with KW) and much slow speed page speed +++.
This month looks like about 30% down...while Google will be up 60%. SERPs are changing hourly and yes, the Pinterst "bug" is still there, two single pin pages with no follows has enough weight to take the #2 and #3 money spots. This is just begging to be gamed, but I'm not going to bite. Google is a friggin' mess, as a SERP, as a company and as policy, buy hey, one helluva self serving ad slinger.
People have also been asking me on Twitter:
@rustybrick Hi, I see a huge drop in Rankings on 28 Oct and the current data is not updated, happened for my 3 different sites.@JohnMu
— Chirag Artani (@Chirag99Artani) October 30, 2020
But like I said, it does not seem to be a really widespread update that every site would notice. It might be specific to a niche or something.
Even the tools are not 100% agreeing on this.
SEMRush is showing changes:
Cognitive SEO also:
Mozcast shows it a bit early, which is not uncommon:
SERPMetrics shows a bump:
Algoroo also shows a bump:
Accuranker tiny bump:
SERPWoo also:
SERPstat is a new tracking tool that doesn't really show it on this date:
So maybe there was some sort of blip around October 28th but it was not a massive update.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
