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:

 

[keyserholiday]

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:

I know how multiple locations can recover.

 

[helloworld]

So where are we linking too the contact us page?

 

[JoyHawkins]

So where are we linking too the contact us page?

I would try a location page or service page if the homepage is ranking organically.

 

[keyserholiday]

I would try a location page or service page if the homepage is ranking organically.

I sent you and @Colan Nielsen a dm of a possible outlier.

 

[keyserholiday]

I found another outlier. I am going to dig in more.

 

[JS Girard]

I just realized: this is going to affect those desktop organic SERPs where the map is pushed halfway or further down the page a lot.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I just realized: this is going to affect those desktop organic SERPs where the map is pushed halfway or further down the page a lot.

Let me know if you find any cases. This is one I haven't seen yet.

 

[helloworld]

I would try a location page or service page if the homepage is ranking organically.

I actually went with contact page. But will see how it goes

 

[maymaynot]

I actually went with contact page. But will see how it goes

How is it going? It hasn't been that long, but I hope things look better.

 

[Kelloggs1986]

Hi Joy,

I think I’m a ‘victim’ of what you’ve described with the Diversity update.

I have two physical locations in the same city - just 4kms apart— you and I spoke briefly about this on here once actually. I originally created sub-pages for each location (as i thought it was standard multi-location setup), but in the schema I listed the homepage as the “organization” and each location as a “department,” with sub-page URLs linked to each. However, both GMBs list the homepage as their website link.

This time last year we were ranking well — both organically and in Maps. Since July 24, organic rankings dropped hard. I’ve been trying to recover, with some progress, but while GMB performance is now steadily declined.

Recently I noticed the location sub-pages climbing in organic results. Suspecting cannibalisation, I removed the sub-page links from schema (leaving only the homepage) and considered scrapping the sub-pages altogether.

Since doing this, GMBs have tanked. At first they fluctuated week to week) now one has almost vanished. We’ve dropped from top spots across 20 keywords to barely showing. One is doing a bit better, but still down from last year.

I know you haven’t seen this the other way round ( update impact Maps while organic holds, but I’m wondering if you'd agree that under the same umbrella using the same link for both GMBs could trigger a similar effect — maybe Google’s treating the link as a single entity and only giving it one chance to be prominent, whether in organic or Maps. The timing and week-to-week GMB shifts seem tied to the schema change.

Plan now is to reinstate sub-pages in schema, reference the locations back and forth with the scheme and gmbs, and replace the home page with the location sub-page as the official GMB link for each.

It feels counterintuitive — diverting traffic from the homepage via the gmbs to improve rank— but everything you’ve described matches what I’m seeing. ie the initial disruption last year, the creeping up in organic prominence of these sub-pages ive never promoted and the idea that a url can only feature once in the serps.

These ideas are going against the historical CTR/traffic = rank theory. As you have tested have you had any ideas on what or moreover why, Google’s heading in this direction?