Anyone seeing major drops the past two days?

[sixthcitysarah]

I know Barry has posted about it, and Semrush's senor seems to be picking up on stuff, but I have noticed some really odd drops in the past two days for rankings, and odd choices (ex: blog posts from 2023) knocking more recent sites down.

Anyone else?

 

[rustybrick]

Yep, 21st and 22nd https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-volatility-heated-40796.html

 

[sixthcitysarah]

Yep, 21st and 22nd https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-volatility-heated-40796.html

Ha! Hi Barry, I've been replying to your posts on Mastodon about it

 

[rustybrick]

Ha! Hi Barry, I've been replying to your posts on Mastodon about it

lol

 

[keyserholiday]

I know Barry has posted about it, and Semrush's senor seems to be picking up on stuff, but I have noticed some really odd drops in the past two days for rankings, and odd choices (ex: blog posts from 2023) knocking more recent sites down.

Anyone else?

Do you have any examples to share?

 

[sixthcitysarah]

Do you have any examples to share?

Sorry Jason just seeing this!

It's been turbulent everyday since I posted, and today's Semsrush sensor is in "Googlequake" territory, and has been climbing for the past week.

Impressions in GSC down as well. Site has no manual actions, no recent redesigns (just a logo change), and nothing (to my eye) crazy as in links loss/etc.

Seeing it with both localized and national terms. Here is a local example for couple weeks:

 

[JoyHawkins]

I have one site in particular that I've been watching that declined quite a bit in January. It seems to have been at the beginning of the month and all organic movement (local pack rankings are fine).

 

[keyserholiday]

Sorry Jason just seeing this!

It's been turbulent everyday since I posted, and today's Semsrush sensor is in "Googlequake" territory, and has been climbing for the past week.

Impressions in GSC down as well. Site has no manual actions, no recent redesigns (just a logo change), and nothing (to my eye) crazy as in links loss/etc.

Seeing it with both localized and national terms. Here is a local example for couple weeks:

I am sorry, I meant examples of blog posts outranking current content.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Just saw this from @LilyRayNYC :

I know Glenn Gabe, Barry Schwartz and some others have shared that there was significant ranking volatility on Google since about ~Jan 21 (a couple weeks after the December core update was officially done).

I dug in today to look at some of the affected sites and was surprised to see a handful of very large brands seeing major impact. The first screenshot shows various blogs from big brands (b2b/SaaS/insurance shown here) that have seen big drops since Jan 21. Zooming in, the drops are mostly isolated to the company's blogs/article sections.

I looked at their blogs and what most of them had in common was just a ton of informational who/what/when/where definition type content for various concepts within their niche. In some cases, the content strayed from the site's core purpose (emoji meaning, motivational quotes, etc.) which has definitely been proven to be risky for SEO in the last couple years.

Also, one of these sites shows '2026' in the <title> of every single one of its 300+ tutorials, even when the page content is about 2025 or earlier... (not sketchy at all!)

In the second screenshot, this is a subfolder containing 500+ resume templates from a resume builder site. All page <titles> use the exact same formula (and of course all end with '2026'). All page templates are highly similar and the example resumes shown on the page are all gated. All of the pages misuse AggregateRating Schema to get star ratings in the SERP. Many pages contain obvious AI content.

I wonder if Google is rolling out new measures to automatically detect/demote low-quality, scaled, highly templated programmatic content.