Google Search Ranking Volatility Bursting

Google Search had an incredibly volatile month of July and it ended the month with a huge bang. The volatility in the Google Search results yesterday, July 31st, going into today, August 1st, is heavy. This may be Google testing a new Google search ranking algorithm update, maybe the expected core update, or maybe not…

The third-party Google Search tracking tools are incredibly heated today, showing big movement in terms of the rankings. As a reminder, the past 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.

Now, on top of all that movement, we are seeing even more movement in the past 24-hours or so.

Below are what the third-party tracking tools are showing and some of the chatter from within the SEO community about the recent Google ranking volatility.

Google Rank Tracking Volatility Tools

Let’s start with what the tools are showing and most are showing big movement:

Semrush:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Cognitive SEO:

Algoroo:

SERPmetrics:

Mozcast:

SERPstat:

Accuranker:

Mangools:

Wincher:

SimilarWeb:

So are you can see, some really intense volatility is being reported on top of the current high level of volatility.

SEO Chatter

There is also a high amount of chatter within the SEO community. This is across the comments here and WebmasterWorld – plus on social media and more.

Here are a sampling of those comments:

Google is getting worse by the day. Today I am looking for one of my articles in the serp, I find it more or less in twentieth position because it has dropped a lot. I check the sites that are there before and most of them are in English, they are not even translated. I searched on Google “it” in italian. It’s truly amazing how much google garbage is

I am seeing a big jump up in the number of terms I am ranking on in the top 3 and top 10 results. Traffic is generally higher, but subject to odd patterns. Some days a specific country’s traffic can be off by 30-60%. The traffic is not producing any sales inquiries whatsoever.

It appears that either we are already in a major recession (we aren’t) or all the options loaded onto each page are just confusing people and making it harder for them to make any choice. The number of free and paid google shopping results, ai snippets, questions people ask, etc is just bewildering and overwhelming with some searches…generally the commercial ones.

Seeing a swift drop today in traffic from Google here in the USA. Looking at the SERPS I see AIO is expanding into more searches and pushing organic results down even further out of view.

Massive shifts today, UK. The update has definitely started.

earthquake today from Spain

Seems the initial phase started. I think soon we’ll get the official notification of the update.

Looks like the core update is coming… Seeing extreme shifts. So far it seems a 0 sum for me mostly.

Massive ups and downs with the SERPS all over the place. This is big.

Extreme shuffling in my niche over months now

Big flux today and big increase in AI Overlords which uses our stolen content. Prepare for the end of organic results as AI Overlords expands its criminal reach across the world.

We know the Google core update isn’t far away and should be here in weeks – is this it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.