For the past few months, Google's search results have been very volatile, but over the past couple of days, it seems, at least to some rank-checking tools, the volatility is cooling and calming. I should note that I did see a spike in chatter over the weekend about movement from within the SEO community, so the tools and the community are not exactly aligned on this one.
We have seen many unconfirmed Google search ranking updates since the last official one in April 2023. But we are all expecting a confirmed update sometime soon.
So what are the tools showing?
Google Tracking Tools
Here is what the tools are showing, Semrush is one of the few tools that have not calmed down at all, while most of the others really showed a huge reduction in volatility:
SEO Chatter
But for some reason, over the weekend, I saw a spike in chatter that may have cooled a bit this morning but was pretty heated over the weekend. Between the WebmasterWorld thread and the comments on this site, here is what SEOs were saying over the weekend:
High traffic this morning and Semrush sensor on fire yet.
As usual, we are in sync...my traffic is very high today from everywhere outside of the US (-49%), CA (-100% 0 visits), and AU (-36%). This is deceiving because it's a lot of useless, one-hit traffic to interior pages... Meanwhile, some of my most important category pages are -50% today. Google is sending irrelevant traffic with one hand and taking away the best referrals with the other, it seems.
Extremely high traffic from everywhere yesterday, except USA which ended the day -11%. Search was up 19% and direct traffic up 73%. Today is a similar pattern, with the entire world going strong, but USA at -46% this morn...despite my ranking heading upwards in the USA market for both desktop and mobile. It seems that Google is focusing on the USA market to squeeze the hardest by far...
Extremely high traffic from everywhere yesterday and today...
I can confirm traffic is up across all main markets on the 22-nd and 23-d and there was a possitive movement on many long tail phrases. It's almost like the traffic before the most recent update.
Sunday's traffic is really nonsensical.The entire morning it was throttled and only getting like 5% of the usual traffic. Then near mid-day a small surge in traffic. Suddenly, traffic became 0 all of sudden until now (10 hours and counting). Checked keyword rankings and they are as normal.
There are a lot more comments but I don't want to overload you with them all, you can click through to those links to read them.
So what are you all seeing? Are things calming for you all today?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
