There are signs of a Google search ranking update touching down late August 28th through August 29th. There is both forum chatter within the SEO industry and the rank checking tools also. It is hard to say if this is a big update at this point, it started off pretty mellow but as I watch the chatter, it is growing at a nice pace. The tools themselves are heating up between August 29th and August 30th as well.

Here are some of the chatter from WebmasterWorld, some as early as late Wednesday, August 28th:

+15% traffic today (against same day last week). Something happened. It is just me ? France, Finance niche

I am seeing some big increases for USA keywords this morning. Most of these are ones that dropped quite a lot in the last two or three weeks.

Lots of keywords have dropped from No1 position for me. I get around 200k+ Pageviews daily but today so far, its very low and I'm hoping I cross 150k at least. I'm sensing a possible major algorithm update before the week runs out.

I'm seeing 5-10% drops week over week in the US in the past couple of days, including today. I also saw similar drops last week. I can't really figure out what's going on as my biggest volume keywords are pretty much ranked the same. What's even more weird is that I can't see any drops in Google Search Console for the same days - for example, for a period where there is a 10% drop in GA, there is a corresponding 1% drop in GSC. I don't know which data to trust anymore.

I'm getting traffic to a lot of the pages which dropped massively in June. It's not much, but it does feel like Google is testing something.

Big increase in traffic after a week or so of going down hill, The person who predicted a update between 29th and 30th August was right so far!

That last comment was about Bill Lambert who posts in the comments section here, he posted 10 days ago in this comment saying "There should be a big update dropping on the 29 or 30. Last weekends test rollout passed all tests. All that I can say is try to get your website visitors to spend as much time on your website as possible." He isn't always right in his predictions but some say he is a Google insider. :)

There is also a bit of chatter about this in the Black Hat World forums, but not too much at this point.

Also Vlad is always on top of this as well:

@glenngabe @Marie_Haynes A bit early, I'm sure, but noticing the volatility and some swings in the SERPs beginning with a moderate amount of chatter. Notice Anything? cc: @rustybrick — Vlad Rappoport (@vladrpt) August 29, 2019

The tools are showing signs as well, here is what they show as of the time I wrote this blog post (which was last night, I am on vacation, so writing mostly late a night. Note, I updated the the screenshots as of 6:45am EDT.)

Mozcast:

Algoroo:

Advanced Web Rankings:

AccuRanker:

RankRanger:

SEMRush:

Cognitive SEO:

Have you seen ranking and traffic changes from/in Google?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Black Hat World.