Looks like another update yesterday into today. With a major holiday weekend approaching, a significant update is to be expected. I saw a slight dip in traffic yesterday, though today it seems to have returned. Conversions are in the tank either way, with the holiday weekend being at least partially responsible.

Anymore it's hard to spot Google's updates. When Google buries one under a ton of Amazon crowded SERPS, I rarely can even spot their updates in my stats. Though with Google's increasing irrelevance in ecommerce, being unable to notice their updates is to be expected. I guess I'm not alone in this as few are reporting anything.

Our site has gone from top 5 to 3rd page on most keywords during the last few hours...Pretty alarming right now and I'm not sure what I may have done wrong.
Could this have anything to do with GDPR compliance?

I woke up to a surprise today. Many of my posts have dropped off 1st positions to page 2-3! D: Some of these keywords I've had on the top spot for years. Some of my articles (information and affiliate) are 2000-5000 words long, and very in depth.

I've been publishing about 2-3 articles per day for the last few months and getting great results.

Now a bunch of low-quality websites with pages that are from 10+ years are ranking above me in the SERPs.

This is crazy... Is this normal and can the sites bounce back? Trying not to panic... but my conversions are clearly down as well over the last few days.

Could this have anything to do with GDPR compliance?

In a word, no. Google is not enforcing GDPR through SERPs

Looks like another update yesterday into today.

I woke up to a surprise today. Many of my posts have dropped off 1st positions to page 2-3

We thought we detected a slight algo tweak yesterday, but my niche is extremely exposed to GDPR, so in the end we put it down to mass panic among our customers.

This looks like a U-Turn on the March update. We're seeing all the old results return... if I had to guess, I'd suspect the previous results are more indicative of whats to come...?

I'm not seeing a u-turn. I am seeing something completely different.

No changes here, other than an a slight and expected drop in traffic due to the holiday weekend in the US and UK. Traffic is still up by more than 20% since the beginning on March.

@jez123 Thats not good news for me then... we've lost all the gains we saw from march.

My articles ranking 2nd or 3rd have dropped to 3rd or 4th page.

Send help.

A number of additional pages of mine have completely dropped out of the SERPs. I am having a nervous breakdown...

EDIT: Found some of the missing pages on page 3 and 4...ugh!

[edited by: lostshootingstar at 2:58 pm (utc) on May 25, 2018]

Don’t die too soon, I’ve gone from 3rd page back to the top on a few keywords, it’s still moving. All in the span of 3 hours.

Edit: after completely disappearing from the 1st page 3 hours ago, my rankings have now actually improved!

Great to hear it Smittie06. I'm still not seeing any changes, but I am sitting here waiting for the ball to drop.

Oddly, all of my other traffic sources have dropped today, most likely due to the holiday weekend. The only one that has not dropped is Google.

I think I see some of my articles moving back up...

I'm going to bed, and when I wake up, all of this will have been just a bad dream lol

I'm seeing moderate ranking fluctuations. Definitely not big by any means.

Conversions are all over the place this week though, so that is concerning and what actually matters.

Things are looking strange here today. I have had a few periods of low traffic followed by short spurts of normal traffic.

Definitely not big by any means.

I concur. If the short drops I see would persist I would worry, but now it's just wait and see. On the other AdSense RPM is good despite the strange traffic patterns.

I would recommend people check their traffic against a similar period last year (as opposed to last week) to account for seasonal fluctuations.

New posts on my blog are no longer indexed fast. This started about two days ago. Even when i directly ping my sitemap nothing happens. Takes hours for new posts to be indexed.

I really don't know what's going on with Google.

@jmorgan, If your post moves from 1st position on google to the 4th page, it's not seasonal. :p

@Halaspike, I've seen this before, but has always resolved after a few days or weeks.

Can someone explain if Google will remove entire site if it receives a DMCA notice for site logo?

Can someone explain if Google will remove entire site if it receives a DMCA notice for site logo?

As far as i know , most claimers put up dmca requests against certain pages that contains their infringed material , obviously it’s certainly not possible for the party to include all the URLs of a given site, but as long as the party sends valid DMCAs , chances are high for their removals . However google won’t remove the entire site for a DMCA received against a single or a bunch of URLs.

most claimers put up dmca requests against certain pages that contains their infringed material

That is the only way you can do it. With Google, you have to do it on a url 1 on 1+ basis. In most cases when someone copies information from my site they copy 100 plus pages and that information may be available on thousands of pages on the offending site (ie if it is an article it can be viewed from the article page plus all the category pages they have it in).

Google makes it very difficult (and very time consuming) to get the site taken down if they have copied a lot of content. It is better to contact the web host of the offending site.

In my niche, they have now changed the images display from one row, to three rows. So 10 organics now down to 7 on page one...probably because millennial's can't read, but like pretty pictures instead.
Here' s the new layout in my niche....
- Shop for "search term" on Google carousel - 1 position
- Images for "search term" - 3 rows - 3 positions (my photos occupy 3 of the 12 positions and have proper source attribution, finally)
- Seven organics (happily I am #1 and #2)
- One Ad
So everything above the fold is pretty pictures.
There's some SERP changes for ya!

Amazingly with these positions, I'm still on drip traffic.

@samwest please stop blaming everything on millennials. It's hardly productive, is it?

^ hmm, interesting reaction. This is not a personal attack, it's a fact. Millennial's would rather see pictures than read. Look at the trend in ads and websites. Used to be long winded text, now it's all about photos. Look at the social network trends, Instagram, Imagur, Pinterest, Snapcaht, etc, etc. It's what they know and what they are fed. I'm just pointing out that in my niche, I see a move towards photos over text based listings that require a modicum of reading. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's surely change and a trend I see continuing. I'm actually surprised it's taking this long for Google SERP's to catch on, guess they are still catering to us old geezer baby boomers who have ample lines of credit. [huffingtonpost.ca...]

BTW - Perhaps I should say "prefer not to read" rather than "can't read" to be a bit more PC and not hurt their feelings. After all, the tech world is shaping to them, not relics like me.

I hope that a lot of events and holidays are rolling out these days and that's the main reason for traffic drop.

Memorial Day, banking holiday in UK and the Champions league final (if your website serving users from EU). Right now I'm in Kiev (Ukraine) where the Champions league final happening - it's hot like in hell here, so many people!

Not sure what your niche is Cyril, but June 1 has always been the low watermark of the year for mine, so...that may be your reason.

@samwest
Last years I wasn't noticing drops during beginning of the summer, hope that won't happen this year! I'm trying to be optimistic and just pretty sure I will see a dramatic traffic increase and millions of dollars on my account in the middle of the next week!:) If not - I'll just continue my work as always and won't be upset. I'm pretty sure that the man who really needs to be upset is Loris Karius...

Fact is Google doesn't respect content anymore. You can have the best content in the world but a site with more backlinks will outrank you.

Content ain't king anymore, backlinks is king now.

I'm still seeing crazy fluctuations on the 1st page for some of my main keywords. So, one of my articles went from position 5, to 3rd page, and now is number 1 on google. The websites listed also look completely different...

"backlinks is king now."

I wish they weren't given as much emphasis in Google's eyes. Thes simple fact is that people with more resources can pay big teams to do outreach and gets links. I've seen sites go from nothing to massive levels of traffic within months and thousands of links. It's not natural and there was nothing special about the sites. It's simply people having more money and connections.

That being said, if you stick with something quite narrow, you can easily outrank big brands who also target the same keywords. Because your whole site is about that topic...

So is it pretty much confirmed Google will likely roll out an update before each public holiday? Does that mean the next update will be on July 4th (or a few days prior)?