Let me start off by saying that while there is a nice amount of chatter in the SEO community signaling some sort of Google update in the past few days, it is hard for me to be very confident because of all the changes Google made in the past week or so. But we do have chatter and some, not all, of the tools are showing changes as well. So there may have been a Google search ranking update in the past few days.
Like I said, Google is testing and changing how snippets look now and also making tweaks to the deduplication of featured snippets. So all of this may not just impact the tracking tools but how people click on the search results to your site and thus your traffic from Google organic search. But let’s not forget some of the speculation around Forbes dropping on the 27th, although – for all I know, this could be an analytics tool bug and not an issue with ranking in Google.
That being said, here are recent some quotes from both Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld:
And here are the charts from the tracking tools, again, some may not have been updated for the featured snippet changes.
RankRanger both desktop and mobile; mobile looks weird:
Bright Local – there are even some local fluctuations:
So there you have it – what do you all think? A Google update or no?
Forum discussion at Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld.
