Google Search Ranking Update January 14th & 15th -

Friday and Saturday, January 14th and 15th there may have been another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. This comes a few days after the unconfirmed January 11th update. There is some chatter but this time, the Google tracking tools are showing much higher volatility.

There does appear to be more volatility surfacing this morning, Monday, January 17th. It is a bit early to see, as the chatter is not lining up right now with what the tools are showing. Of course, it is a US holiday today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So that might result in less chatter, as some are off, but it wouldn’t directly represent why the tools are showing so much change.

So if you saw ranking fluctuations around this time, you are not alone.

Google Tracking Tools

This time, I’ll start by sharing what the tools were showing on Friday and Saturday, it seemed to calm down a but on Sunday.

Advanced Web Rankings:

SERPmetrics:

Community Chatter

Here is some of the chatter I found around these ranking changes, fluctuations and volatility.

Yesterday’s traffic and today’s SEMRUSH report shows that I may have reverted to whatever poor results I was getting last week. I suppose today will define whether that’s correct or not but it’s certainly a slow start.

Anyone else see a short lived reprive from poor traffic?

Looks like a huge drop in usa traffic this morning, but it’s only 6am so hard to say. Every place else is zooming. One of my smaller competitors just leapfrogged everyone to the top after languishing for months. My ranking is still at a low and not recovering at all, but the traffic has been better, albeit low quality. The inquiries are all from clueless people with low budgets and highly unrealistic about what things cost so half the time I ignore or delete them without responding. That is a big contrast to last year this time.

The new year traffic gains seem to be holding in non-USA traffic. But USA traffic is still highly throttled. Once again I’m slowly losing top 3/10/20 ranking terms… no recovery of the over 50% of top 3/10/20 terms lost since this time last year. Those are gone forever for any site with commercial intent, and that traffic is going to informational sites and how to articles. This new year bump in traffic is producing some conversions though, so that’s one small thing to be thankful for…while it lasts.

So far a much busier than average Sunday traffic even with 3 hours to run.

US traffic for me as normal but, I don’t know why, something just doesn’t feel right.

Sensors are up again. Perhaps too many websites benefited from the recent updates so it’s time to ‘adjust’ things now.

@rustybrick
Something is happening! My traffic suddenly increased by almost 20%! pic.twitter.com/kgBXs3iqq6

— Rashed Hasan Akash (@RealOnnorokom) January 16, 2022