As you know, Google released its first core update in over five months, the Google August 2023 core update, on August 22nd at around 1:30 pm ET. Since then, I’ve been tracking the volatility and the chatter from within the SEO community to see how widespread, extensive, and impactful this update has been.

So far, and keep in mind, it is far from over yet, and the update does not seem as widespread as previous core updates. That is not to say sites were not hit hard and in a significant way, but it just doesn’t seem like this update had a footprint on tons of sites SEOs are working on. The update seem to hit some sites in a really big way on Friday, August 25th.

Again, if this update impacted a site, they could have seen 20 to 80% gains or losses in terms of Google Search visibility. And yes, we have some examples of that to share…

To summarize the details below, here is what I am seeing so far:

• Google August 2023 core update announced on August 22 at 1:30 pm ET
• First movement noticed around Friday, August 25th
• Sites impacted can be impacted in a huge way with traffic gains or losses from 20 to 80%
• Impact is not as widespread as previous core updates

Let’s dig into the sources I track to show you why I came up with the above summary.

SEO Chatter

Here is some of the chatter from the SEO forums and comment areas across WebmasterWorld and BlackHatWorld. Most of the chatter started on Friday, August 25th and continued through the weekend:

Sunday: Today, once again, there has been a nearly 50% traffic drop, and an additional 30% of pages have been deindexed, which has been ongoing since August 17th

Sunday: Had a nice boost in rankings for the past 2 days.

Saturday: well, all of my sites officially dead now… And all of competitors sites are also dead. its like one day site up, next day site down. it goes like 30% up but next day 20% down, and next day 1% up, and next day 5% down and so on (and after some time, one point came where whole site is dead)..

Friday: Huge drop for our UK hotel site, lowest day of August at 63% of this month’s average and one of the lowest for 2023.

Friday: I am seeing some movement in the US finance sector. Started about 11 am PT.

Friday: It seems like there are some fluctuation (based on real-time report). Since the universal analytics is down, unable to see hourly search engine traffic. GA4 reports takes 24-48 hrs to update. So, we have to wait for the accurate results.

Friday: After 12 hours of my Googleday my hotel venue traffic is at 11% of its August daily average, yes that is -89%

Friday: Seeing some positive traffic improvements today.

Up 20-50% each hour.

Friday: However on Jul 20th, my largest website –with 900k pages indexed– started to show a +20% traffic boost (+15% in GSC’s total impressions). It was an increase (that still remains) in the number of indexed pages, not in the rank.

Source: seoroundtable.com