Google Christmas Search Algorithm Update Chatter

Over the past few days or so, I have been seeing chatter both at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World around ranking and traffic changes related to Google organic search. I got to say, I doubt Google pushed anything specific this week or even next week. Rankings do change by itself and new content is always being added to the index but an algorithm update – I doubt it.

Logic tells me that no one at Google wants to push anything big related to new ranking algorithms or changes to search quality during the holiday season. If something goes wrong with a push, then having to come back to the office or step away from the family to debug it and figure out the problem is likely something no programmer or engineer wants to do during this time.

Also, the tracking tools are really not showing significant ranking changes over the last several days or so. The last we saw was maybe related to one around December 17th or so but that could also be related to an analytics bug.

Finally, less people are searching for things over Christmas – so expect less traffic. People are with families, sipping coffee with their feet up on the couch.

Let me at least share some of the chatter over the past few days from WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World:

Another update seems to have started today on Christmas. We’ll know the results by Monday.

Something is cooking up again, I’m having a 3,000 active users on site shown in GA. I believe these are bots where the real human traffic should be around 400+

It’s weird, huge drops.

Dec 18, 2019
1st site: from 1st to 12th page
2nd site: from 1st page to 12th page

Dec 25, 2019
3rd site: from 1st to 17th page

I see strange behaviour, almost all my pages lost their keywords, but 90% of these keywords now on my main page with worse ranks when they were on others.. Looks like page weights are changing.

also i noticed today the rest of the traffic decreased even more

It seems I am the only one lucky for google update my website traffic increase but the problem the bounce rate is also increase based on analytics.

Just an quick update: one of my site got rankings back. Most of keywords disappeared now back to previous positions. Hope everything will be fine for all ????

Someone also shared this chart and said “I also have a German site that is not “hit” but it lost almost all of it’s traffic in 1,5 week time:”

Analyzing traffic around Christmas and New Years is always a challenge – so if you want my advice, don’t look until the week after New Years and see how things are doing then?

I will say that the black hat forums are way more active with this chatter.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.