Google Search Ranking Volatility Heated December 3-4

I am seeing some signs of a Google Search ranking update and intense volatility that kicked in late yesterday. The SEO community started chattering about it over the past several hours and some of the tools are showing a spike in volatility with the Google search rankings.

The last time we reported on Google ranking volatility was right before Thanksgiving and that one was a very big one. Then before that was November 20th and then November 12th and then before that with what I called the Movember update around November 8th and then the Halloween update and then between October 15th to 17th and then on October 7/8th.

I am still confused why we have not had more core update, more often. And more importantly, why someone from Google didn’t communicate anything about it.

So what are we seeing?

SEO Chatter

Let’s start with the chatter within the SEO community. Keep in mind, there was some sort of Google Analytics real time issue yesterday morning but that was fixed after a few hours.

The folks at WebmasterWorld started to pick it up last night:

Someone help me. Why am I still up at 4am in the morning editing articles? More so when traffic is still dropping.. I need my sanity tablets…

I’m wondering the same thing. Since Wednesday, traffic has dropped by another 80%. I don’t even need to mention advertising revenue, and I’m slowly starting to fear that things won’t recover and the news site will just die out.

Something happened between Dec 2nd and 3rd. -50% drop.

Worst drop last night. Not a single user between noon and 4am.
We are at 30% of normal traffic.

That is some of the chatter… I suspect it will get noiser soon.

Google Tracking Tools

Here are what the tools are showing right now, again, I suspect some will update tomorrow with more heat. I may update the post to show what the tools are showing tomorrow:

Semrush: