It’s possible that we have yet another Google algorithm update today May 22, 2021, with the rest of the updates earlier this month culminating in one massive Google update this morning.
Industry tools are off the charts, higher than they have been for awhile now.
It’s too early to include industry chatter, but we’re keeping an eye on things.
So far, this is the industry chatter over on Webmaster World:
Another day in hell.
Semrush is 8.7
Yes, big movement in semrush. Like all past updates it will hit me tomorrow. At the moment things are very quiet on my end. Could this be a core update?
update: I looked into other platforms aside semrush, at the moment it doesnt appear to be like a core update.
weekend shenanigans becoming a norm now…is it that the SERPS / New AIs don’t sleep. 😀
Someone had a theory that the AI is now in charge of the updates and decides on its own who will enjoy a nice run of traffic and who won’t every weekend. Interesting theory if you ask me.
Global site slow’ish today so far however UK sites doing fine.
If the UK sites continue like this I may have to increase their base expectations since there have been only four days this month below average and they were all on a weekend at the beginning of the month.
For weeks my home page and many of my main landing pages had dropped like a stone and the traffic was going to my interior pages. Now all of the sudden in the last few days this reversed back to a more normal pattern of home page receiving most hits, followed by my landing pages. It’s as if all of my landing pages had a penalty for some time. My ranking is down today, and for some terms I have dropped off completely…I suspect they’ll be back tomorrow. Every day something new with Google. The last week was just awful…very low USA / Canada traffic every day.
I posted this but I’m pretty sure others have as well before.
It’s pretty much because this is how ML/AI actually works.
I was involved in a few (non-search) projects that involved machine learning and a crucial part of ML is to let it run its course and not manually interfere with it too frequently.
Basically you tell it you want it to generate these results. The ML algo will then attempt to replicate those results by adjusting different factors on its own and evaluating the results of those changes and then implementing new changes until it gets to a point it generates results that are close to your initial specifications.
But the above involves you letting it do its thing on its own for a while – something that will inevitably mean mistakes and bad results in-between – until you get the result you want. If you interfere too much and too frequently manually then the algo won’t really “learn” on its own, so to say. With every manual interference you kind of mess with the learning curve. This is very oversimplified but it gets the point across.
Core updates could be when they do significant manual changes to the algos. It’s why they are probably done so infrequently. They have to let it run some time before they can interfere.
The seemingly weird search results and very frequent “updates” in-between could be just the ML algos working and constantly adjusting ranking factors to try and generate the desired results.
What Do the Tools Say?
Semrush’s sensor is off the scales at 8.7 out of 10, and their SERP volatility chart shows that readings are higher than normal, and numbers are also higher than normal in the industry readings. This indicates a possible massive algorithm update, although it is unconfirmed by Google at this stage.
Will Google Confirm This One?
Given its magnitude, one wonders if Google is going to confirm this update.
We know they have confirmed prior core updates in the past, and that they do tend to confirm core updates.
It still remains to be seen or confirmed, however. Also, it is still too early to tell what kind of update this is.
As this is an unconfirmed update, we’ll continue to keep an eye on things as they occur.
