I've been watching the chatter in the SEO industry, and honestly, it hasn't calmed down much since my last report for the period of June 8-12. The Google search results seem more heated today, and there appears to be an unconfirmed Google search ranking update underway.
There is still a lot of chatter and today, the tools seem to be showing an uptick in volatility. So I figured I'd show you what I am seeing because it is good to know that you are not the only one seeing ranking changes with your site.
As a reminder, the Google May 2026 core update was completed on June 2, 2026. With that core update we saw significant volatility on May 21, 2026, and then that following weekend, we saw some significant ranking volatility, and then again, this past weekend, we saw even more volatility. Finally, on the last day of the core update, Tuesday - June 2, 2026 right before Google said the update was done, we saw even more volatility.
SEO Chatter
The folks over at WebmasterWorld and on this site have been active, here is a sampling of some of those comments:
Looks like something has happened in the last few days. I'm seeing a lot of volatility again.
Traffic to the news site has continued to decline. There’s no competing with the World Cup. News in my niche is flooded with old articles about the weekend’s game, soccer betting, and articles that are reposted hourly (not updated). Traffic is so low that it’s not even worth publishing an article right now.The shop, on the other hand, is currently generating good sales via Google, which, to be honest, surprises me quite a bit.
Overall: Search results are a disaster even outside my niche. More and more spam sites are showing up; they seem to be popping up everywhere right now because of the World Cup.
I didn´t think it could be worse, but then Google changed something last Friday.
The traffic is incredibly unstable. It seems like traffic from Discover and search is trying to come back, judging by 30-minute real-time analytics, but then suddenly the traffic is abruptly cut off. This has been going on for several weeks. It simply doesn't give any chance to earn money for a living.
Totally dead traffic. That I see.
Traffic absolutely dead today, but it's summer, who knows. Rankings shuffle, so I can't even keep track. I do wonder what the point of having a website is. Information websites? gone.
UK is very volatile
Google Search Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing:
Google Volatility Chart
AWR:
Wireboard - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
What are you seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
