Today, there has been yet another Google Algorithm update. This update started Wednesday and continues until today.
Industry chatter is up, along with the usual tools, pointing to significant changes in rankings and traffic for many webmasters.
The folks over on WebmasterWorld.com have weighed in on their specific circumstances:
It’s been nearly one and half a month, and traffic remains down (-60%). They’ve completely ignored Discover issues despite so many issues.
Same boat as you MP. Absolutely Discover has been obliterated for us (yet Google happily takes content en masse with large paragraphs for their featured snippets because of the ‘user experience’).
Hey all, just wanted to say we’ve definitely benefited from your updates about this last big April update. After being way down in the rankings the last 11 days we saw a big recovery starting yesterday. Hoping it sticks now. The site had no product reviews whatsoever so it was confusing why it was affected.
Same here. After getting killed in February and March, and bleeding traffic week after week, two days ago marked a slight uptick that’s carried over the past few days. I almost don’t want to mention it for fear of jinxing it, but I am definitely seeing some positive movements.
Yea I hear ya. I hesitated to mention it too. We had a big drop in March too that only lasted 3 days and then recovered. So not sure why we’re getting caught up in these updates because we weathered all previous updates with no issues.
This morning USA traffic is down 65%, while UK traffic is up 300%. I am in the USA but my UK traffic is twice my USA traffic. Traffic from most non-USA countries is strong, but USA is a train wreck. Is anyone else seeing only their USA traffic dropping today?
I just searched for a very common but specific service. The first three places don’t provide the ‘specific’. The next four were price comparison sites, with none of the information I was looking for. The last three were Google books.
On to page two, and five of the results are from Italy (or at least they are .it domains). I’m in the UK with cookies deleted. None of these sites could be reached, one redirected me to a site blocked by Norton. Perhaps Norton blocked the others too.
On to page 3; eight of the results were .it domains. I didn’t click on them.
On page 4; all .it domains. I gave up at this stage.
Wondered if I had a virus. I’m really experienced and I don’t download anything but just in case I ran a scan on my computer; nothing found.
I tried my laptop; very similar results so no it’s not a virus. I didn’t click on any of them.
I checked the cached versions; they are just full of scraped mashups.
Either something is very wrong with Google this morning or someone is playing some very effective games to mess up the SERPs.
I might just as well stick a pin in a dictionary as use this advertising agency for searching. It seems to get worse by the day, as if that was even possible. This is definitely a new low though.
What’s Going On with This Update?
It looks like people are experiencing recoveries more than complete decimation of their rankings and traffic.
Time will tell. So far, however, for those who are putting in the hard work it’s clear that the updates are showing some benefit as a result.
This is usually how it happens: sites get hit by an update, but they recover in the next update as long as they continue improving their sites overall.
Google, however, has not yet confirmed the update today.
We will continue reporting on and bringing you the news on the latest Google algorithm updates, as always.