Rankings Moved This Week and Google Is Not Saying Why

What happened this week

Earlier this week, site owners and the tools that track rankings reported unusually large movements in Google's results. Some pages fell sharply; others rose.

The search industry has already nicknamed the change Fred. Google has not said what changed, or why.

Asked about it, people at Google have said that search changes all the time, and pointed site owners to the company's published quality guidelines.

That is all anyone outside Google actually knows. The rest of this week's commentary is guesswork, some of it confident.

Why one week is too short

• Rankings vary by location, device and the person searching.
• Tracking tools sample results from one place at one moment.
• Large movements often settle over the following weeks.
• Your own edits make it impossible to tell what caused what.
• Calls and enquiries lag behind positions, in both directions.

The fourth does lasting harm. An owner who rewrites the home page this week can never tell whether a later recovery came from the rewrite or would have happened anyway.

What a lower position means

A page that moved from third to eighth for one phrase has lost visibility for that phrase. It has not necessarily lost customers.

Local businesses get much of their search traffic through the map results, which work on their own logic, and through searches for the business name, which rarely move.

The figures that matter are the ones the business counts: calls, form enquiries, bookings. If those hold steady over several weeks, a lower position for one phrase is a note in the file, not an emergency.

Check what you control first

Before reading anything into Google's behaviour, rule out the site itself.

Load the main pages on a phone and a computer. Check that the site has not been hacked, that no recent change blocked pages from search, and that the hosting has not been failing.

In Search Console, read the messages and look at Security Issues and Manual Actions. A penalty applied by a person at Google appears there; an algorithm change sends no message at all.

Use Fetch as Google on the most important page to see it the way Google does. If it comes back broken, the cause is closer to home.

A worked example

A one-boat fishing charter, run by its skipper, takes most of its season's bookings between now and May, nearly all from people searching for charters in its harbour town.

During an unsettled week last spring, its main page dropped off the first page for its most important search. The owner's instinct was to rewrite everything that weekend.

Instead he wrote down where each main page stood, found no messages in Search Console, confirmed the site loaded properly, and added a note to Analytics with the date.

The position came back within about two weeks, with nothing changed. The review he did anyway found three species pages that were nearly identical apart from the fish named in the first line.

He rewrote those over the following month, with seasons, departure times and what each trip includes, because the pages were thin whatever Google did next.

The quality questions worth asking anyway

Google has published a set of questions describing what it means by a high-quality page. They make a better checklist than any rumour.

They ask whether a visitor would trust the information, whether the page offers more than the obvious, and whether it was written by someone who knows the subject.

They ask whether a site has several pages on the same topic with slightly different keywords, and whether ads distract from the main content.

They ask about spelling and factual errors, and whether visitors would complain on seeing the pages.

None of that depends on knowing what changed this week, which is why it is worth working through now.

Pages that exist only for search

Google's guidelines warn against pages created mainly to rank rather than to help visitors, and many small business sites have a few.

The usual example is a set of town pages, each a copy of the same text with a different place name. Another is a blog of short posts written around keywords rather than customers' questions.

Those pages are worth rewriting or combining whatever this week turns out to have been. A page that exists only to rank is a page that can stop ranking.

Measure in weeks, not days

Write down today's positions for a handful of searches that matter, and check them on the same weekday for the next three weeks.

In Search Console's Search Analytics report, compare clicks for the weeks before and after this one. It holds ninety days, enough to see a pattern.

Add an annotation in Analytics on this week's date, so anyone reading the graphs later knows something happened outside the business.

Three weeks of figures will say far more than three days of worry.

What not to do this week

Do not rewrite the main pages in a hurry, remove pages wholesale or change page addresses. Each causes its own movement and muddies the picture.

Do not buy links, or answer emails offering to recover lost rankings. Paid links break Google's guidelines, and nobody outside Google knows what this change was.

And do not read too much into forum threads. The sites posting about large drops are not a random sample.

The counter-case

Some things need action today. A hacked site, pages accidentally blocked from search or a message in Search Console should be dealt with immediately, whatever else is happening.

If calls and enquiries fall and stay down for several weeks while positions stay low, that is no longer one week's noise. It deserves a proper review by someone who works on search professionally.

Nor is waiting an excuse to leave thin pages alone. The quality questions apply in any week.

For everything else: check what you control, write things down, and judge the change over weeks.

The next three weeks

1. Load the main pages on a phone.
2. Check Search Console for messages and actions.
3. Fetch your most important page as Google.
4. Record positions for five important searches.
5. Annotate the date in Analytics.
6. Compare calls and enquiries week by week.
7. Work through the quality questions page by page.

Step four makes the next decision possible. Without positions written down this week, any judgement in three weeks rests on memory, and memory exaggerates.

Asking Google to look at a page again after a fix is covered in fetch as Google after an important change.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.