Friday morning, November 8th, I saw a sprinkle of chatter across the industry about a Google search algorithm update. Some were claiming massive changes in traffic and rankings. But to be honest, the chatter was incredibly limited, that is until several hours later and now the chatter throughout the weekend is off the charts. By chatter, I mean the community talking about the changes in rankings and traffic from Google organic search. It is literally off the charts and I will share some of this chatter with you now.

The automated tracking tools are showing virtually no update since Friday, November 8th. Which is also weird and gets some speculation out that this is BERT related - which to be honest, makes no sense. Sorry.

In any event, this update seems to hit all niches, industries and verticals. I will add that the Black Hat forums are extremely active with chatter, but so is the more white hat forums. So this is all over the place right now.

Let's start with WebmasterWorld, here are some of the comments:

Entertainment industry here, i see lot of movement on my end, lot of sites losing their ranking heavily and couple hours later everything gets back to where they were. This weekend should be very interesting imo wink

I hate to say this but something seems not right for a Friday trend . 8th November may be ? BERT was good for us and things coincide with Bills prediction about the possible roll back .

I also lost a lot of traffic since last night. I also saw a drop in keyword ranking on my pages. I'm not sure if this has something to do with my site not yet secured (https) but I've been through years without my site migrating to https and my ranking is good. @pokwerpok and @browndog are your sites already https?

Yep something is going on, got hit yesterday. -16% down comapred to last week....

Yes, here too. Main 2 sites, different niches, different geos, have been slightly loosing traffic for the last 2 weeks. But yesterday one was 25% down vs same day last week and the other 15%. Today it seems it's going to be worst.

We where doing well when the BERT algorithm rolled out, however we can hit by something yesterday. Lost 50% of our traffic overnight.

I concur...the week started out ok' but the bottom fell out yesterday. Seeing a lot of churn in the SERPs. Really looks like a rollback to a few weeks ago for my niche. It's a mess.

We saw an increase of 24% with G organic yesterday vs. the average of the last 8 Fridays. We'll see if it holds through the weekend and into next week.

Down by 22% from this time last week. I need to find a way to get out of my subscriptions and shut down the site. It breaks my heart, I love it, but it's no longer viable.

Improved SERP positions but traffic down by 24%.

There is a ton more there but you can visit those forums to see more.

Here are two different threads from the Black Hat World Forums - I am including select quotes but it does seem there is more activity in these forums:

yes, my website dropped, 40% omg I hate them

Lost about 40% of my traffic. This sucks!

Lost 30-40% of my traffic on My health site with White-hat SEO only

Yeah, I have. Been dancing for a few days, let's see where it stops.

-30% on my website

Down around 30%. Many high volume keywords have dropped while long tails have largely remained stable.

up 30% yesterday and today

Mine dropped 25%.

I’m experiencing decrease too, like 20-30% in last few days.

Again, there is a lot more chatter but I cannot copy and paste it all here.

Let me include a bunch of posts on Twitter as well:

BIG unannounced Google Update starting yesterday? I have had MULTIPLE food & lifestyle blogs reach-out reporting 30%+ traffic drops when doing a 11/8 to 11/1 week-over-week comparison. Example drop below. cc: @rustybrick @martinibuster @Marie_Haynes @jenstar - ouch! 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Xri8JXjLVm — Casey Markee (@MediaWyse) November 9, 2019

Yeah, newer site I’m running. Whitehat, lifestyle content. pic.twitter.com/8zDTAqSxR2 — Paul Shapiro - SEO Edition (@fighto) November 10, 2019

Same here for my affiliate site, huge drop in rankings for my main targeted keywords. Never got hit by an update before. All white hat, long, super high quality content! For the main kw, i ve been in the 1st position for + 1 year, now suddenly it dropped to page #4. — Andra 🏳️‍🌈 (@AndraMarac) November 11, 2019

My bad it's 70% drop in my organic traffic from 5th november till 10th? Is it going to change by any means in near future? — My Dainty Kitchen (@MyDaintykitchen) November 11, 2019

I'm down 25% organic in the last two days. I've seen positive impacts from every previous algo update. — Becca (@BeccaLudlum) November 10, 2019

same. Down 25% and even though I didn't necessarily lose my rankings I lost a of traffic because I'm no longer showing in the featured carousel things above the #1 spot. — Britni Vigil (@PlayPartyPlan) November 10, 2019

I've got a 17% increase. — Chef Dennis (@AskChefDennis) November 9, 2019

Mental Health Knowledge base & Directory - up 20%

Travel booking - up 14%

Travel booking - up 25%

Recipes - up 12%

B to C eCom - up 20%



Tech news - down 20%

Skin care affiliate - down 48%



Alternative health - not impacted

Other Recipe sites - not impacted — Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) November 10, 2019

FYI, based on your tweet earlier. Could be a seasonal change since the holiday season is upon us now... User behavior changes so the SERPs can follow. :) https://t.co/gZfApAUDLo — Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 9, 2019

Seen a 30% drop on one site, appears to be across all pages. Have had a look at a few affected sites, no identifiable patterns between them. — Dan Richardson (@dan__richardson) November 11, 2019

Whatever Google pushed on 11/7, it seems to have hammered some sites in the illegal download niche. Holy cow, check out these drops starting right on Thursday 11/7. The first had a ton of visibility, the second not so much. But both fell off a cliff. pic.twitter.com/OXNoDyyHmZ — Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 11, 2019

The weekend was busy for all my websites (up 10%), except for the one domain (online game) which has been punished since October 12 pic.twitter.com/4JtEezPizY — Clinton Pearl (@republicanruler) November 11, 2019

Yes, seen almost a 40% drop in impression and clicks of one my websites (Dog and Cat Health) started from 8th Nov 19. However not any major change in my other ones. What is the possible reason? Any Clue? #organictraffic pic.twitter.com/YvcqMimb07 — Saday Kumar (@sadayk) November 11, 2019

On my website, I saw a jump of 50% on Friday but normalized over the weekend. — Sajeesh (@vavettan) November 11, 2019

30% drop for one website in favour of larger generic newspaper/media authority sites. No change in another, less visible website using same tactics. Absolutely no change whatsoever in auto finance niche in the UK. They seem to have been aggressive on small affiliatee websites — Ronnie Lawson-Jones (@Ronneh_) November 11, 2019

Me 30% drop across all pages, really strange — Ganjar Maulana (@ganzhar) November 11, 2019

Same here: 25% drop on one site 15% on another ...😱 — SEO Toddler (@SeoToddler) November 11, 2019

Now, like I said, the tools are pretty much not showing anything as a whole:

Mozcast:

SERP Metrics:

Algoroo:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Accuranker:

RankRanger:

Cognitive SEO:

SEMRush:

One More Thing... This Bill Lambert character on November 1st posted in the comments on this site saying "They want to do a rollback on Nov. 8." This was related to BERT and maybe how it impacted the NY Times? But again, with the BERT release, I didn't see this much chatter about an update at all - the chatter was small if any.

What are you seeing? This update seems very weird and again, Google has not confirmed it yet.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World Forums.

Update: Google somewhat confirmed it by saying they did several updates: