Decline in core local rankings since jan 14 2025

[helloworld]

There was a murmur about local rankings dropping in jan. Not 100% sure if it was from organic or 3 pack. I concentrate on organic personally.

A client site that has ranked 1st page for 10 years on his main local (ego) terms has been dropping since then.

I am perplexed on how to fix it. The only thing I could find was that he lost 2 niche links in the past 6 months. Competitors have remained the same.

He uses a separate company for PPC. I had begrudgingly given them access as admin to wp and sometime in Dec they added unbounce. That page is using a root path however it is no index. It was previously on a sub domain which I preferred. I am not sure they have done anything else.

Does anyone have a resource or has experienced the same in this time frame?

 

[JS Girard]

I don't do organic, but the report you link to was only for GBPs and is certainly unrelated to what you're experiencing.

 

[JoyHawkins]

There has been a huge change that has been rolling out since August of last year that I've been studying and testing on over the last 3 months. I'm about to release a video in 2 weeks highlighting everything I've learned. There is also a fix to it. I'll post back here as soon as it's live. It's scheduled for Feb 18th.

To clarify - the article you posted was about local pack rankings, and it corrected itself a few days later. What I'm referring to is a huge organic change, which is what you're describing. It only impacts local businesses though.

 

[helloworld]

There has been a huge change that has been rolling out since August of last year that I've been studying and testing on over the last 3 months. I'm about to release a video in 2 weeks highlighting everything I've learned. There is also a fix to it. I'll post back here as soon as it's live. It's scheduled for Feb 18th.

To clarify - the article you posted was about local pack rankings, and it corrected itself a few days later. What I'm referring to is a huge organic change, which is what you're describing. It only impacts local businesses though.

We should jump on a call.

I am leaning towards an over optimisation mostly.

Example: target site Painters Melbourne. Position 3-7 in past 12 months +years prior

Optimised for painters melboune target partial match homepage.

Variation not declined i.e. painting melbourne

Second site

Optimmised for Moving Melbourne. kw in meta + offer

internal page /moving-melbourne

Exact match h1 Moving Melbourne

----


Because niches are ranking differently it is hard to pin point but my guess is AI is picking up onpage content as manipulation andd taking more interest in the meta title. That doesn't really math the painter case though

 

[JoyHawkins]

We are going to be doing a live FAQ the week of Feb 20th about it so you should definitely come, it it's not 3am where you are lol. I know the time zone difference is pretty vast. I think our conclusions are quite a bit different so far but I will be going over examples and explaining it all in detail.

 

[helloworld]

Yeah am won't work for me

 

[JoyHawkins]

As promised, here is the video that covers everything we've discovered about this update and what to do about it if you were impacted: