Google Search Ranking Volatility From October 15th To 17th

There may have been another unconfirmed Google search ranking update that occurred between October 15th and October 18th. The bulk of the volatility seemed to be around Thursday, the 16th.

The last time I reported on Google ranking volatility was on October 7/8th and to be honest, there has been a lot less chatter since Google turned off the ability to see 100 results per page and the tools began to recalibrate. But that being said, SEOs can tell, outside of these tools, when there is a ranking adjustment and it seems there was a significant one around October 16th.

Also, we are well due a core update, I mean, so much for the promise of more core update, more often in 2025. We only had two confirmed ones in 2025 and we are at the end of October now. I guess Google can squeeze in another two core updates, but that would not equal more core updates in 2025.

Anyway, there is a nice amount of chatter at WebmasterWorld, some chatter at Local Search Forum and some on this site.

SEO Chatter

Let's start with the chatter, which spiked around October 17th:

Visitor numbers on my news site have fallen to an all-time low this week. Google simply isn't updating the news feed and is only showing articles that are weeks old in my topic. Normal searches are generating virtually no clicks anymore... it's just frustrating, especially because you can see that the only sites that are working are the really big publishers. I'm slowly starting to believe that the internet is finished and that it doesn't matter what we do.

I think there was a rollback this week. Traffic has become better in the beginning of the week and then on Wednesday it suddenly switch to very bad traffic with lots of bots again.

Still no real-world business enquiries however a consistent traffic week across all sites with no crazy spikes until today when Ten Cent Could Computing from Singapore decided to perform, like Huawei Singapore, individual url visits on one of my .asia sites from many IP addresses ... Needless to say those IP ranges are now blocked.

Google is changing its search results every day. There is little consistency in rankings from day to day.

Seeing rather large losses across multiple clients (12 clients) Service + City based landers - 50% visibility just vanishing. Rank 1-3 for 16 Keywords October 15th and now 6 Keywords as of 10/16/2025. Anyone else getting slammed? Google sensor is high, 7.5 but nothing I would think I would need to look at.