Google Search Algorithm Ranking Update October 15th Through October 18th?

I lead with I am sorry for yet reporting on another Google search ranking algorithm update – another unconfirmed one. But like I said on Friday, there seemed to be one ticking up and it seems Google did have some fluctuations from October 15th through today and the chatter in the SEO community supports it this time.

This does not seem to be an explosive update but there are numerous SEOs who took notice of this update over the weekend. Some are reporting huge changes in rankings, and many not for the better. Some are saying 20, 30 or more percentages drops in traffic and rankings for their main keyword phrases in the past few days or so.

I will say, unlike what I posted on Friday, this update has a lot more chatter and a lot more SEOs taking notice of ranking declines.

SEO Chatter

Here is the chatter at WebmasterWorld after October 15th:

I think we are on a new update right now. Big changes in Germany.

Starting the morning with a massive decline in USA traffic, -74% at 10:30am. CA -40%, home page down 40%. UK / AU normal. Rather than the usual starting off normal and dropping off a cliff at 8-9am sharp, today traffic has been very low across every hour. This is happening so often now that you really can’t call in an “update”…Google just goes from massive decline to the next 2-3X a week now…traffic has been abysmal since September 14th.

Huge decline so far this morning in traffic… -20% or so. Haven’t ever seen this happen before….

Search is down 30% and direct is down 35% as of 12:30pm today…what a freakin catastrophe Google is every day now.

Traffic is declining for the past 2 days. I feel that a SERP update is going on.

Big drop in rankings. All google did today was downrank dozes of keywords.

Even for a Saturday this is very quiet, 15 hours of my Googleday gone and traffic at 26% of average. The last 3-4 hours of my Friday night were also quiet.

one of my top competitors has been obliviated (including me btw). This has nothing to do with domain rating for sure. I think its about trust score but I am not sure. I notice a big drop in the backlinks in gsc. Did you experience this as well?

Huge drop today…… Certainly today will be my main site’s worst performance in years. Congratulations G!

I think I must have flicked the switch yesterday afternoon with my questions since traffic started to flow resulting in a completely normal day with the USA performing Octiber’s average. Today’s started well with some big hits from the Indian sub-continent which is cimpletely normal for me.

Saturday traffic was relatively normal, but today USA and UK traffic are both down more than 40%. My daily home page traffic is perpetually down for weeks, sometimes by as much as 60% on any given day. This was also the case in June, when my home page would just vanish from the SERPs every other day.

Tracking Tools

Here are what the tools are showing over the past few days, not all are showing big changes after October 15th.

Semrush:

Mozcast:

SERPmetrics:

Algoroo:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

RankRanger:

Cognitive SEO:

Did you notice changes over the weekend?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.