Google confirmed a search ranking bug, a “very small issue” it called, that affected a “small number of websites” where those rankings would drop out of Google Search results over the weekend and then reappear during weekdays.
Google statement. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that this issue has now been resolved and only affected a “small number of websites”. Google wrote:
We are aware of a very limited issue that caused temporary fluctuations in search results for a small number of websites. The issue has since been resolved and sites should no longer see the effects.
The question. The problem appeared to affect sites that were on top-level domains, top-level domains, and non-standard domains. These TLDs ended in .club, .consulting, .life and other non-standard TLDs. Some of these sites noticed that they stopped ranking entirely on the weekends. Initially, I thought so it was a quality issue, being on the edge of quality, or a bug with Google Search. But it turned out to be a bug with Google Search.
The first person I saw cover this was Tomasz Rudzki ZipTie. In short, he wrote: “On the weekends, something weird kept happening: the website would completely lose rankings and traffic. People couldn’t even find it when they searched for it by name.”
What was interesting is that these ranking issues coincided with several unconfirmed Google updates that occurred over the weekend. He said: “9 out of 9 examples were non-standard TLDs such as .consultancy (example.consultancy), .care (example.care), .club, .info, .energy. The dates he shared matched the algorithm updates that I reported He said these were the dates:
Example of ranking chart. Here’s an example of a ranking chart showing the drop in Google Organic Search weekend performance:
Why we care This issue appears to have persisted since November 2023, but now a few months later, following these reports, Google has resolved the issue.
If you’ve been seeing strange ranking issues over the weekends and you’re in one of these non-standard TLDs, this may have affected you. I noticed these Google search ranking updates over the weekend stopped for the last week or so.
Hopefully, you won’t see it ahead.
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