Following a noticeable spike in Google search ranking volatility on May 16, the SEO community is abuzz with reports of substantial traffic fluctuations. Many users are observing drops in search visibility, with some sites experiencing up to a 60% decrease in traffic. Despite earlier updates this month, SEO experts believe this latest volatility may signal an active shift in Google's ranking algorithms. Various third-party tools have corroborated this trend, suggesting an official update may be underway, despite no new core update having been confirmed for 2025.
The most heated day seems to have been on Friday but the chatter is pretty busy over the weekend within the SEO community.
Yes, I covered previous unconfirmed Google updates on May 12 and 13, May 8th, but then it was a couple of weeks since April 25th.
Here are the third-party Google volatility tracking tools, you will see that most showed the biggest spike in volatility on Friday, May 16th.
I checked and hundreds of links from real, high ranking sites have vanished from my GSC panel. My visibility also dropped at SEM.
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