Google Search may have pushed some unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update or tweak around Friday, January 24th. I briefly mentioned this on my Friday video but I felt it was worth kicking up here as its own story.
We may be seeing more Google search ranking volatility start to get heated starting this weekend, through January 20th and 21st (and maybe today). Some of the Google tracking tools are having issues tracking these changes but some are not. But I do see a lot of chatter spike in the past couple of days.
We may be seeing more Google search ranking volatility start to get heated starting this weekend, through January 20th and 21st (and maybe today). Some of the Google tracking tools are having issues tracking these changes but some are not
For the past week, we’ve been discussing how most of the third-party tracking tools have been showing much calmer and cooler search ranking volatility. This is all while the chatter within the SEO community still seems super heated. The reason may be that Google has been deploying new and more advanced blocking mechanisms towards these SEO tools.
Over the weekend I reported that the Google Search ranking volatility tools finally began to calm. But the truth is, I have seen a big spike in chatter around Google ranking changes over the weekend and more so through Monday. It seems that while the tools have calmed, the chatter has heated.
For the first time in forever (see what I did there?) the third-party Google Search volatility tools have cooled down to normal volatility levels. The chatter has been somewhat more typical levels over the past week, that is not to say some have not seen decreases or increases in their search visibility, but as a whole, it seems things have calmed down a bit.
There are reports of a major local search ranking change with Google Maps and Local Search results. The reports of this local search algorithm update started to funnel in over the weekend, with some saying they saw local listings rankings drastically change from its previous position.
The Google December 2024 core update and the December 2024 spam updates are both complete, but yet, the Google search ranking volatility is still intensely heated. It feels like one or both of these update never ended and it continues to cause heated ranking volatility the week following the end of the last Google update of 2024.
Google has rolled out fewer confirmed search ranking updates in 2024, then it did in all the past years where Google confirmed these updates. Google rolled out seven confirmed updates in 2024, nine in 2023 and ten in 2022 and 2021.
Google has completed the rollout of the December 2024 spam update after a seven-day rollout cycle. This update started on December 19, 2024 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on December 26, 2024. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update.