Google Search ranking and results have experienced increased volatility over the past 24 hours or so - the search results are heating up. I am noticing an uptick in SEO chatter within the industry and also some of the tools are showing increased search ranking volatility.
Can Google be prepping to push a new Google search ranking update - I mean, we've been expecting more updates, more often but honestly, we have seen less.
It also seems like most of these unconfirmed updates are happening around Thursday on the week, with some outliers. The last time we reported on Google ranking updates were a number of unconfirmed updated, including May 21st, May 16th, then May 12 and 13, May 8th (I didn't cover May 1st, I probably should have) but then it was a couple of weeks, not since April 25th and then before that, 22nd and 23rd volatility and then around April 16th and then before that around April 9th. We have yet to have second official update in 2025, we had the March 2025 core update but no other official update in 2025 - yet.
So here is what we are seeing with this latest Google Search ranking volatility:
Google Tracking Tools
Here is what the third party tracking tools are showing over the past 24 hours, I suspect we will see them get even more extreme tomorrow:
Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter
There is also a lot of chatter within the SEO community, both on this site and on WebmasterWorld. Here is some of that chatter:
Site traffic remains anemic — mostly single-page zombies and casual browsers who likely arrived by mistake. Adwords performance hasn't been any better.
Incredibly poor traffic yesterday from everywhere...search traffic was down 23%. It almost seemed as if there was an outage, but i guess just more tinkering and almost daily updates...
Yes, since yesterday traffic is worse again. Again we are seeing short to long times where no user comes from Google. It seems like a role back to rubbish SERPs.
Traffic is increasing here, record highs almost every day. Search terms in Google Analytics show increases every day, so it looks positive for the future. CPM is down a bit in the last week. Don't panic, it will probably change over time.
For my global sites this past week has seen a 40% reduction in traffic therefore most likely on Sunday 1st June these sites will solely have a splash contact information page. For my widgets G / search / enquiry generation has altered massively, the first 20 years were very beneficial to us. Since about 2010/12 G 's manipulation began in earnest and by 2015 it was only going one way and that has been downwards.
This week has been terrible. The shop is dead again. Since Monday, Google traffic has been practically zero, and sales have plummeted accordingly. Even AdWords is hardly bringing in anything. Overall, it's been a terrible month for the shop. As Martin already said, the times of day when no one comes to the website via Google are increasing.
It's freaking bad today
Final, my website traffic is down. Now is very bad, worst ever. 15 years go to toilet.
Today traffic dropped more than 50% with no reason. The past days were fine, but now we struggle.
Today and yesterday we are about 20 % lower in compare to our standard traffic. It is quite better than during last 4 weeks, but still not good numbers as we wanted. What is interesting, this traffic drop is ONLY from Discover, Search is with no hit (luckily) :)
So what are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
