The last time I covered the ongoing Google search ranking volatility was when I said there was a bit of a cooling period. The weird thing is that most of the week that Google volatility was calm but chatter did spike up towards the end of the week, but the tools that track it didn't show that volatility heat up until a couple days later.
So let me catch up on what I've seen over the past week in terms of Google search ranking volatility chatter and the tools.
It seemed like on Wednesday and into Thursday, August 20th and 21st, we saw a spike in chatter. Where SEOs both on this site and in WebmasterWorld noticed some big swings with their rankings. That seemed to calm down into Saturday and Sunday but then the third party tools that track the volatility spiked on Saturday and Sunday. Weird, right?
As a reminder, the June 2025 core update started on June 30th, completed early on Thursday, July 17, 2025 but the volatility remained heated throughout even today. When Google's June 2025 core update was announced, we didn't see much of any volatility. But then we saw volatility touch down on July 2nd. Then on July 10th we reported on folks noticing partial recoveries from previous core updates and helpful content updates (again, not everyone). And then, even four days after the core update completed, the volatility was heated throughout and it still has not calmed down - even over weeks later. The last times we covered this ongoing volatility were on August 6th and August 11th. Then we saw that cooling period, I discussed above.
Google Tracking Third Party Tools
Many of the tools show calming over Saturday and Sunday - some do not - but many do:
Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter
Here is some of that SEO chatter I was talking about from this site and WebmasterWorld.
Mix started... Keywords positions up, but after refresh down. Discover same - mix.
Crazy, Yeah something is definitely going on. Keywords are all up, but traffic was down 50% yesterday, then an additional 40% today. Yikes…
Normal weekend, great Monday (up 21 percent week over week), and probably a modest WOW drop today. Just the usual Google traffic volatility. For us, "same old" used to mean little change; now it means a series of peaks and valleys.
Traffic has been terrible since Saturday and worst for a long time Sunday into Monday. Discover visibility massively impacted, similar to the end of the active update period and the week immediately after. Just off a cliff for no reason.
Something big happened today. Traffic went off a cliff! Down at least 50%.
Something happened today. Traffic was down 50 percent than previous day. Very bad....
Same here. 50% on top of the 50% of July
Very low traffic across all my sites today. UK sites I can understand with it being our last holiday weekend until Xmas but for my global sites this is not "normal".
I am not seeing my pages being de-indexed at all, however the rotation of traffic can be extreme at times. Today traffic to my home page is -80% at 12:30pm. That's 80% lower than the norm for the last 4 Saturdays. However, overall traffic is about average for a Saturday. I see this all the time with my home page...traffic will just totally vanish and the traffic gets routed to other pages on the site. That has been going on for years now, but the size of the drops is extreme now.
There is the update on Google updates for you all.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
