Since Friday, August 9th, I have been seeing yet another intense spike in Google Search ranking volatility. This is based on the SEO chatter within the communities and of course, the third-party Google Search rank volatility trackers.
And no, we still do not have a new core update officially released by Google but it is coming soon, weeks away…
As a reminder, last week we reported on volatility on August 6th and then we had that bursting Google volatility around July 31st, the previous two weeks have been incredibly volatile and also July 23rd, then before that was July 18th and then July 9th we saw big movement from Google Search.
Then again, this past weekend, I have been tracking some big movement with Google Search ranking positions. Maybe Google is testing the next core update? If so, we are still not seeing any positive direction from those hit by the September 2023 helpful content update.
Google Rank Tracking Volatility Tools
Let’s start with what the tools are showing and most are showing big movement:
The folks on this site (now almost 400 comments in a few days) and on WebmasterWorld are noticing a lot of volatility in the past couple of days.
Here are some quotes:
The current traffic is like a slow drip of nothing.
And a lot of shuffling going on. The results are for some of the product queries in my niche not geospecific at all and all over the place. When I search from Germany, I don’t want to get results from the U.S., Canada or outside Europe at the top.
The results should be German results first, then European results and then the rest of the world. This has been always the case up until sometime last year.
I agree with you that the English results for a search from Germany are extremely annoying, especially for topics that affect Germany. I even get English websites presented to me when I search for something related to my income tax return. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find something with Google. Unfortunately, Bing and thus DuckDuckGo are getting worse and worse.
This is the worst my rankings have ever been. AI sites are popping up, taking over my rankings less than a year old. Not sure how long I can survive. Google ends up banning these sites for 6 months to 12 months, only to replace them with another one. It’s really affecting my site.
The fact that these AI sites rank at all is shocking. This August update seems to have weakened Googles defenses against such SEO content. It’s not dramatic yet. Maybe some 10% more crappy SEO sites ranking.
Let’s see if it gets worse. Spammers are certainly pumping out more “niche sites” than ever before and large publishers with no moral compass are milking their reputation more than ever before, because there is still no penalty for that.
Traffic is surging this weekend, everywhere except for the USA, which is only up +1%:
Click throttling hard this week.
It feels like we’re back to April’s throttling. In April, just when Q2 starts, traffic dropped very drastically and SERPs make no sense. Sales went little to zero despite rankings the same.
It is happening again this the start of August, or rather, after the monopoly verdict. Many have pointed out the same.
Google is hopeless at this point.
Helpful Content Update movement?
And on the helpful content update, we are not seeing anything. Glenn Gabe posted this morning on X, he wrote, “I had some people ping me about running the visibility numbers for the 380+ HCU(X) sites I’m tracking. Nope, no movement really on that front.”
Here are those posts:
Still a ton of volatility as we lead up to the next core update. Looks like 8/4 is another big date with many sites seeing movement then (with some reversing course based on previous tremors this summer). I have included some screenshots below of search visibility changes across… pic.twitter.com/2k7BOeuXoD
And just to underscore the insane volatility we have seen this summer, check out the visibility trending for the site below. Talk about a roller coaster… And the second screenshot is a site I’ve been tracking that’s heavily using AI content. It surged a few months ago, started… pic.twitter.com/2zpLk4IFz7
“Once hit by HCU, there is no coming back. I spent far too long trying to recover. One of my HCU hit websites. Looks like everyone else’s.”
If Google is testing the core update, none of these tests over the past several weeks have shown any recoveries for those sites hit by the September helpful content update. Yea, I am sorry to report on that.
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