Google Search seems to be ranking some websites well on weekdays and then dropping that ranking on weekends. There seems to be a lot of focus on non-standard TLDs, you know, those new vanity TLDs you can make up. I’m not sure if this is a google search issue or if the problem is the quality of these websites.
confirmed Update January 22, 2024: Google has confirmed the issue, saying: “We are aware of a very small issue that caused temporary fluctuations in search results for a small number of websites. The issue is has since resolved and sites should no longer see its effects.” It’s interesting because those weird unconfirmed weekend Google ranking updates stopped. The rest of this story has not been updated and was originally written on January 18.
The super interesting part is that most of the dates of these ranking drops coincide with the weekend Google search ranking updates we covered here. Each of these site drops occurred with these unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. That’s not to say that only these non-standard TLDs are having problems, I asked people on this site in the comments a few days ago if their affected sites were non-standard TLDs, and the vast majority said no, they were in .com TLD.
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.”
The dates he shared matched the algorithm updates I reported. He said these were the dates:
He said: “9 out of 9 examples were non-standard TLDs such as .consultancy (example.consultancy), .care (example.care), .club, .info, .energy. Again, in my research, many other .com sites and other standard TLDs appeared to be affected.
Then the other day Olesia Korobka posted X on a support thread with a similar problem. Olesia wrote: “The question is, do all .media, club, clinic, etc. websites experience the problem? Or could it be a mix of locality and tld or something else?”
The question is whether all .media, club, clinic, etc. websites. experience the problem? Or could it be a mix of locality and tld or something else?https://t.co/kehMg3phLS
— 🐝 Olesia Korobka 💙💛🐝 (@Giridja) January 16, 2024
I went into the thread and yes, these are all non-standard TLDs and the dates match what Tomasz Rudzki covered. Last night, Roger Monti covered this thread too, calling it a bug. Here are some examples from the thread of the Google Webmaster Help Forums:
The person wrote: “Since late November, my website has been periodically disappearing from Google search results, affecting my online presence and traffic significantly. This issue has occurred seven times since then, with my site returning to its previous positions six times, but is currently absent again.” They shared this graphic and links to similar complaints on forums.
Here are more graphics from the threads:
Now, is it some kind of bug with Google Search? May be.
Or maybe it has to do with some of these sites that are on the edge of indexing with the limit of quality. At first, when we reported these issues, we thought it was a bug that Google was indexing some sites, but Google said no, it was a problem with these sites at the edge of quality and Google doesn’t think it’s worth it index them Google has told us that pages/sites can enter and leave their index when they are at the quality threshold, that quality threshold or not enough to be in Google’s index.
And I don’t think it’s limited to just non-standard TLDs from what I’ve been tracking with these weekend updates.
I think Google’s quality line for indexing content has been really weird over the last few months and maybe, just maybe, that’s what’s going on.
Or maybe it’s a mistake? I’m not sure.
What do you all think?
Discussion in the forum a Help for Google Webmasters, X i X.
confirmed Update January 22, 2024: Google has confirmed the issue, saying: “We are aware of a very small issue that caused temporary fluctuations in search results for a small number of websites. The issue is has since resolved and sites should no longer see its effects.” It’s interesting because these weird unconfirmed weekend Google ranking updates stopped. The rest of this story has not been updated.
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