In the early hours of yesterday morning, Google experienced what many people thought was a dramatic, disastrous update to the search engine. Fortunately, this has since proven to have been a glitch, but not before uproar was seen across the SEO world.
The glitch was experienced by users worldwide, encompassing all languages. Outrage was most vocally expressed by English language countries and those in Europe and Asia.
Search Engine Journal labelled Google’s search results during the glitch as “useless”. The glitch appeared to affect everything, from companies’ page results to searches for recipes.
Casey Markee, a recipe blog SEO, tweeted about the effect of the glitch on recipe carousels:
The carousels are f**ked. Look at this one for "baked beans" it's all over the place. I have several other examples. Good times. pic.twitter.com/avxxu10Fed
— Casey Markee (@MediaWyse) August 11, 2020
Users from around the world also took to WebmasterWorld to express their outrage at the “update”. A common trend appeared to be large corporations like eBay, AliExpress and Amazon dominating the SERPs, with ecommerce sites reporting extreme ranking fluctuations.
User webdev29, in France, detailed the effects on his site:
“No word to describe the mess, its simply crazy! there is no more ecommerces in my SERP (decoration) and mine has just lost everything…6 years destroyed in just one minute and the lives of several employees at stake! it’s not possible that it continues like this, in the SERP, there are only the big marketplaces (cdiscount, amazon, laredoute, aliexpress…) and some more or less recent sites without much interest…all the rest has disappeared on the deep pages of the search engine.”
Another user, Whoa182, noted how his site’s articles were fluctuating dramatically in the search results, going continuously back and forth from page one to page seven.
To the relief of users everywhere, Google’s search results eventually reverted to normal and Webmaster Trend Analyst John Mueller tweeted that the update was, in fact, just a glitch. He said:
“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.”
As of yet, details are still unclear. When asked on Twitter whether Mueller would be sharing such details, he replied that as he did not have all of the details, it was “hard to say”.
While this particular update turned out to be just a glitch, it’s always best to keep up to date with the latest updates to search engines and rankings. Here at Engage Web, we can do all of this for you, and ensure your website fulfils its ranking potential. Why not get in touch with our team today and see what we can do for you?
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