Google rankings moved a lot on Tuesday
Site owners reported big swings in where their pages rank, and Google has not said why.
Google search rankings moved sharply on Tuesday. Barry Schwartz, who tracks this stuff daily, flagged it in the morning after seeing a spike in chatter from site owners, and by the afternoon he said the movement was heated.
Google Search ranking update seems to be hitting this morning - seeing a spike in chatter
Google has not named or confirmed an update. So nobody knows yet what is behind it, or how long it lasts.
What this actually means
An update is a change to how Google decides which pages to show first. Google announces some of them. Others show up only as a wave of site owners posting that their traffic jumped or fell, which is what happened here. Until Google says something, this is unconfirmed.
This is not the first wave this month. Site owners reported unusual ranking shifts a few days ago that Google also never confirmed.
What to do
Mostly nothing, at least not this week. Rankings often keep bouncing while movement like this plays out, so the number you see today may not be the number you see on Friday. Acting on one bad day is how people break pages that were fine.
If you want a record, open Google Search Console, click Performance, and set the date range to the last 28 days so you can see this week against a normal week. Write down which pages moved. If the drop is still there in a week or two, you have something real to look at. If it snapped back, you have your answer.
One caution. Do not go rewriting or deleting pages because of a two day dip. Do not buy links to compensate. The sites that recover from ranking swings are usually the ones that kept publishing genuinely useful pages and waited the wave out.
We will cover it here if Google confirms anything.