Google Search Ranking Volatility Heated Again (June 28 & 29th)

We are back with you with another report of another unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update. This one seemed to have kicked off yesterday, June 28th and is heating up even more today. Yea, it has been a very volatile past several weeks with the Google Search results and even I am kind of tired on reporting on this.

I expected by now Google would have released a “confirmed” search ranking update but nope, not yet.

Previous Recent Unconfirmed Updates

Just to catch you up, we last reported about an unconfirmed Google update around June 23rd then on June 19th we reported about ongoing heated volatility with Google Search. We also reported on an update on June 14th, one around June 14th and ongoing, then June 6th then around May 22/23rd, then around May 17t, then on May 10th and the other around early May.

It has been a wild time for unconfirmed updates but the last confirmed update was the April 2023 reviews update.

Google Tracking Tools

So what are we seeing now from the automated tracking tools? They mostly all seem very heated.

Semrush:

SERPmetrics:

RankRanger:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

Mozcast:

Cognitive SEO:

Algoroo:

SEO Chatter

Now let’s see what the SEO community is saying recently about this heated Google weather via WebmasterWorld and some from the comments here:

Search is down 34% today at noon. USA is -48% and UAE is -55%. That follows the same pattern for more than a week now, no matter the ranking. My rank shot higher yesterday, but traffic is lower.

Huge drops today…30% lower search traffic. USA traffic is down 30%. DE, CA, AU, UAE all down between 15-45%. UK is the only bright spot, up 24%.

Terrible traffic today. I am pretty sure it is due to Google pushing two or three featured snippets at the top, resulting in lower CTR.

once again a big drop After 3 good days. It seems about 70%. Oh Boy, Google will have a great quarter.

Massive flux in the serps today, which has become quite typical from a lost company unable to find its source of direction. The only constants I see are the paywall of ads above organic results and the lack of converting organic traffic these ads have consumed.

Lots of bot traffic today … like 300% more than usual

Glenn Gabe also posted some charts this morning, just several minutes ago, so I was able to add it to this story:

And here’s a leading site in a YMYL vertical that looks like it was hacked recently. About 400K urls indexed now and many were spammy reviews added. Check out that surge in visibility… Note, the site is now redirecting those urls to the homepage (so they are aware). pic.twitter.com/916RJUhXc5

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 29, 2023

What is going on with Google – I guess this is the new more heated norm?

What are you all seeing?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.