If you are seeing big changes in SERP, you are not the only one. On August 10, Google has released a change to its search algorithm that has shuffled search results in a way not seen since Penguin or Panda.
The first thing that jumps out seems to be related to jobs and work. Websites advertising jobs seem to be the big winner of the brawl, now ranking on the first page even for generic keywords. Looking for a service? Here are companies hiring for it.
Some suggest that this could be related to the sharp increase in unemployment due to COVID-19, and the amount of people looking for a job as a result.
Other winners seem to be Amazon and Ebay. Could this again be explained by the increase in online shopping during the lockdown?
The strange thing about this update is that, unlike core updates, nothing has been announced by Google, leaving some SEOs to think that this is a bug and only temporary.
Seems a bug to me, at least a [bad] test. Affiliate sites have disappeared from super competitive niches, ecommerce sites completely gone from local and long tail keywords. Crazy, insane.. What's going on @JohnMu ?
— Matteo Giannone (@matteogiannone) August 10, 2020
First page is full of eBay, Amazon, Yell, for local keywords I am seeing inner pages with area in url rank well, brands not ranking for their own products, I have been monitoring one keyword in particular over the last hour and positions are jumping around constantly - in the UK
— SEO Hive (@seo_hive) August 10, 2020
This has to be a glitch. It looks like it's crawling and indexing the entire lot. Sites coming back but random pages, then it changes minutes later. Anyone else seeing that?
— Just Tom (@seotwentyone) August 10, 2020
John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google that is normally engaging with the SEO community has also remained silent on Twitter as well as Reddit, further fuelling the the theory that there is work in progress and that the update isn't definitive yet.
On reddit, there are reports that affiliate and smaller shopping websites have coped it the worst, with some fearing for their revenue.
The common advice in such situations is to sit tight and give a few days for the dust to settle.
Update: John Mueller has confirmed that it was a glitch and has been fixed, although some still report funky rankings.
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.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 11, 2020
If someone could fix the other 2020-issues, that would be great.