Over the past 24-hours or so, most, if not all, of the Google rank checking tools are showing spikes in fluctuations in the Google search rankings. The weird part, the chatter in the SEO community and individual people complaining about ranking changes has really not spiked with the tools.
Normally, the two go side-by-side. SEOs, site owners, webmasters – come to the forums and complain or boast (but mostly complain) about ranking changes in Google Search. They notice their analytics tools or even rank checking tools show a drop or change in position or traffic and come to find out why. I am seeing very limited chatter, outside of people talking about the tools showing changes on a massive scale. But in terms of individual complaints, at this point in time, I am seeing very little complaints, if any.
The tools however, almost all of them, are showing big changes in the Google search rankings. It is not just one tool, but all of them. Which is weird. If one tool was off, sure. But all of them? Maybe Google made some underlining code change that impacted all the tools? That doesn’t seem logical to me.
I should also note, Google tends to pre-announce broad core updates and Google did not do so yet. So this may be some sort of interesting Google search algorithm update or maybe some weird change that caused the tools to tremor. It is super early at this point and Google has not commented yet on anything related to this.
Anyway, here is the limited chatter I found on both WebmasterWorld and a couple of Black Hat World threads. Note, I checked the main Google forums where you see individual complaints often and I am not seeing any of that as of the past 24-hours.
So those are the folks saying they see some changes, but nothing massive for most folks. And heck, most of the responses were about people not seeing changes in traffic or rankings.
Now for the tools, here are screen shots of the tools as of this morning.
So – let me know – do you see ranking changes and Google organic search traffic changes this morning across the sites you monitor?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
Update: The fluctuations continue and maybe there was some weirdness with sitelinks?
