On Monday afternoon, the SEO society started noticing massive ranking fluctuations in the Google search results. Earlier, it looked like the Google algorithm’s old updates. However, as time went on, it just began to look like a glitch.
Google spokesperson reported last night
“I confirmed with the team that this is a bug that we are fixing but still in the process of fully diagnosing, so we don’t have specific details to share right now. “
John Mueller of Google also posted regarding the glitch
I don’t have all the details yet, but it seems like this was a glitch on our side and has been fixed in the meantime.
If someone could fix the other 2020-issues, that would be great.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 11, 2020
The SEO team began to see differences in the Google search results at 1:30 pm ET on August 10. Then by 5:00 p.m. ET on August 10, it appeared to have begun to spread out overall. At 11:55 p.m. Google proved it was a bug. Nearly by 12:40 a.m. ET on August 11, Google announced it had been solved. Therefore the problem appeared to have lasted several hours in total, placing the SEO society in a panic mode.
If you witness huge organic search traffic variations in the analytics from yesterday afternoon, then neglect it. Create an annotation in the GA remarking that organic search recording should be neglected for that particular time. Everything should be normal this morning.
Although this doesn’t imply that the rankings did not shift. Rankings keep changing in Google. Still whatever occurred recently was fixed, as stated by Google. Here are some tweets validating the same:
2 good exs of the volatility that happened yesterday evening when the glitch rolled out. Checking hourly trending in GA for Google organic traffic shows a surge that came back down w/in 6 hours. The other shows a big drop in hourly trending (10-15K per hour), which also reverted. pic.twitter.com/VLQlVvADaB
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 11, 2020
And here’s a good example of a SERP during the glitch versus the live results. Notice the same domain showing up many times and the support-origin xbox urls don’t resolve. The live results shows major publishers with articles about streaming on an xbox. I marked each screenshot: pic.twitter.com/wJmx4b6kST
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 11, 2020
Google did announce it is now “in the process of fully diagnosing” the matter. Google says “the company will give us more information on this issue today”. Google has faced bugs over the past year often about crawling and indexing.
Conclusion
This was a short-lived glitch that remained for certain hours last evening. You may have dropped organic traffic, new customers & revenue or have benefited. However, the rankings and the required sessions should be operating as before.
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