I wouldn’t normally write 2 newsletters in a week, but I have had SO many emails and DMs with questions about what’s happening in search right now (real questions, not those fake ‘someone asked me the other day’ hustlebro LinkedIn hooks!) that it feels like the right thing to put a few things in the same place.
If you’re an SEO expert then this probably isn’t going to be of much interest to you (sorry), but hopefully it will reassure a few other people.
What’s happened with Google over the last week or so?
Google removed the ability to use a parameter in search that allowed you to see 100 results all at once instead of the usual 10 (&num=100).
This meant that most of the tools people used to track rankings (SEMRush, SE Ranking, Ahrefs, Moz, etc) stopped working properly, making it look like there was a problem with your rankings.
It also meant that the ‘Impressions’ figure in Google Search Console dropped almost immediately for a lot of companies, also making it look like there was a problem with your rankings.
‼️THERE WAS NOT A PROBLEM WITH YOUR RANKINGS ‼️
I know it’s confusing, because a lot of you are telling me it is, so I’ll try to summarise each part, with links to other posts I’ve written if you want to look into it more.
If you’re busy, the TL;DR is:
Your rankings haven’t changed. Google’s parameter change just means the tools that report your rankings and traffic are a little bit screwy right now. Things will settle. Please don’t worry.
Google used to let them pull 100 results with one query, then report your ranking in the top 100. Now it doesn’t.
There was no warning of this, so lots of ranking report results past #10 started to show as N/A or -.
Those rankings hadn’t disappeared, but looking at ranking tools and there reports, it looked as if they had.
Manual checks showed they were still there.
In order to check the top 100 again, tools have to change how they pull results – sending 10 requests instead of 1 for each keyphrase you are tracking.
This is a HUGE job and will take up a lot of resources. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know exactly how huge, but I’m guessing a lot of people were saying “Oh shit!” when they realised what was going on.
Imagine how many keyphrases you track, then imagine that times the tens of thousands of customers each SEO tool has. Then imagine it is now 10X the work for each keyphrase tracked, to give you the same results in your reports and dashboards that you were seeing a week or so ago. That huge, I guess.
YOUR RANKINGS HAVE NOT CHANGED BEYOND THEIR USUAL FLUCTUATIONS.
Almost immediately after Google removed the parameter, the impressions reporting in GSC dropped off a cliff for almost everyone.
Impressions in Google is the amount of times your site has been seen in the results of a search, whether you are #1 in the rankings or #97.
It makes sense that while all the SEO tools can’t do top 100 searches, all of those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of searches aren’t happening.
It also pretty much proves that a lot of those ‘impressions’ were never seen by a human eye (which a lot of SEOs have been saying for a long time) because it was bots doing the searches. (I have some thoughts and questions on search volume figures too, but that’s for another time).
The good news is that right now the number of impressions you are seeing in GSC is probably more true to real life.
Your average position result in GSC has probably improved. Because, maths.
YOUR RANKINGS HAVE NOT CHANGED BEYOND THEIR USUAL FLUCTUATIONS.
So yes, it’s worrying at the moment for your SEO consultant, but not for the reason you as a website owner are worried.
You’re worried your website isn’t showing up for the same searches it was last week – but unless something drastic has happened with your rankings (which for 99% of you is unlikely), or you’ve been whacked by the ongoing Spam Update (also unlikely), isn’t the situation. You’ll be fine.
Your SEO consultant is worried that they can’t easily track what’s going on beyond position 10, probably a little stressed that their reports look a bit wonky at the moment, and concerned that all of their clients are emailing with a million questions. They’ll be fine too.
Are Google arses for doing this without telling anyone? Yes. But as I’ve said many, many times, they don’t owe us anything, and we don’t have a right to advance insight into their business decisions, even though changes they make can affect our websites and our livelihood.
Things change in SEO, all the time. Sometimes, like now, the changes create a few waves. We review, we complain, then we adapt. Same as it ever was.
The one thing I want you to take away from this? YOUR RANKINGS HAVE NOT CHANGED BEYOND THEIR USUAL FLUCTUATIONS.
