Is the Core update affecting local rankings more than usual?

[JS Girard]

Anyone noticing significant volatility recently?

I've done spot manual checks today and one thing I'm noticing is a LOT of cases of significant differences from earlier in april. Keywords that stopped generating local results in Google Search in particular , but also a few significant ranking changes in general that are not otherwise explainable as nothing else seems to have changed significantly. What surprises me is that while I'm used to some keywords flip-flopping, the keywords I'm seeing vanish have been very stable in generating local results in Search for the four years I've been doing this (e.g. "lawyer sex assault + city" or "pregnancy acupuncture + City").

This would have happened either at the tail end of the Google Core update or be an unannounced local update.

Last year's spring core update did include a minor local component...

 

[JoyHawkins]

I didn't see anything massive. Some of our clients had some big gains on the organic side (not local packs). I also see lots of SERPs that don't show local packs on desktop when they did before, but the local pack is still present on mobile for the majority of these. I wouldn't say that's something I saw specifically connected to the core update, but more a trend I've been seeing in the last year.