🙈 Google Feb 17th, 2021 Update

I hate to say I was waiting for a Google Update, but I was. I really wanted to see what the rank tracking filters picked up across my projects.

Losers

For me there were 29 keywords (positive tagged) that dropped from the #1-10 position to page 3 (#31 and below):

Moving up a bit I have 403 keywords there of rankings that were #1-10 (first page) that dropped to page 2 (#11 and below):

In comparing the above two scenarios: 399 dropped to page 2 or lower, but only 29 of those keywords went to page 3 and lower. That's actually very excellent news.

I can figure out if it was on-page factors that impacted those rankings and can most likely get them back into the top 10.

I'm going to throw them through ZORA and see if any new elements within the new top 10 are present on those pages but not on mine, then fix those.

Drops happened but not severe.

Winners

In terms of winners, I have 385 keywords that jumped into the top 10 from page 2 and below (I'm monitoring a little over 24K keywords in my account):

I started by sorting by traffic and immediately note that large sites are jumping into page 2. So far these have been the best winners of the 385 keywords:

Domain	Movement	Total	Percentage
facebook.com	77	385	20%
(hidden client #1)	47	385	12.2%
youtube.com	33	385	8.6%
wikipedia.org	32	385	8.3%
twitter.com	28	385	7.3%
moz.com	24	385	6.2%
ahrefs.com	26	385	6.8%
cnn.com	22	385	5.7%
semrush.com	18	385	4.7%
backlinko.com	5	385	1.3%
serpwoo.com	9	385	2.3%
imdb.com	7	385	1.8%
buildersociety.com	0	385	0%
foxnews.com	0	385	0%

To get the percentage I simply exported the 385 rows to CSV and sorted by "Domain" (Note: within the rank tracking display settings I had to switch to showing 1000 rows instead of the default 100).

Again remember these domains were on page 2 and under before the algo update.

Facebook.com took a huge chunk of the increases from page 2 to page 1. 20% of all the increases across my projects for this filter was Facebook.com. Hmmm...

Just the sheer volume in my account tells me that either Zuckerberg recently bought an SEO course or he used the secret sauce. As Dan would say, "the secret sauce we don't show the YouTubers..."

What I was not seeing was Instagram.com - I was curious but then I remember, IG is usually #1 or #2 for most celebrities, politicians, and public figures already (that's a hint for you online reputation management specialists).

So Facebook's massive movement got me curious and being a numbers guy I had to look deeper into the domains that dropped. Repeating the filtering process except switching the filter to dropped pages: page 1 terms that are now on page 2 and below - I got 399 terms:

Domain	Movement	Total	Percentage
facebook.com	72	399	18%
(hidden client #1)	58	399	14.5%
youtube.com	26	399	6.5%
wikipedia.org	24	399	6%
twitter.com	32	399	8%
moz.com	32	399	8%
ahrefs.com	19	399	4.8%
cnn.com	25	399	6.3%
semrush.com	20	399	5%
backlinko.com	6	399	1.5%
serpwoo.com	8	399	2%
imdb.com	5	399	1.3%
buildersociety.com	6	399	1.5%
foxnews.com	3	399	0.8%

Winners versus Losers

Re-looking at Facebook.com it almost evens out in terms of wins versus losses, it won a bit more than lost though. YouTube.com and Wikipedia.org won a bit more than lost.

(hidden client #1) might not be having such a great day since the losses so far have edged out the wins.

All this took about 15 minutes by using the Rank Tracking's CSV export and sorting with Apple's Numbers.

Our goal is to make as much of your data as accessible as possible so you can showcase this to your stakeholders as these updates happen.

Let us know if you have any feedback on the rank tracking module or anything else!

If we get more data as we continue analyzing this latest update we'll give you guys a heads up.

Learn More:

• Rank Tracking

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