Google update this wknd or page title issue?

[AndyMacLean]

Hi,

I've seen a big ranking drop for many major terms, for a particular site, just on Google. This happened Fri 20th or Sat 21st just gone. I don't see any news on an algorithm update over the weekend.I had changed many of the sites major page title protocols 2 weeks ago but a) I would have expected any negative effect before now and not all at once b) the protocols were carefully crafted to avoid traffic drops for major terms and c) i'm seeing traffic drops for keywords that still start at the beginning of the page title d) im seeing drops for some pages which are still using the OLD page titles. I had even tested the protocol on a number of pages in advance to ensure it wouldn't cause problems. As a bit of background - the title protocols were changed to make them more user friendly and less keyword heavy. CTR from search improved so was hoping for better not worse rankings!

Ideas, gratefully appreciated.Andy

[TimHolmes]

Apparently there has been quite a bit of activity, but according to a post from Barry Schwartz there has been no update from Google. - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-no-21225.html

However the Moz metrics and others all pointed to something happening. I would suggest monitoring all yours sites closely for the time being.

Knowing Google they probably did do something!

Alternatively, I suppose the changes could also be tied to the timeframe in which yours sites have been crawled by Google, as such some of your changes could also have had an impact.

[DmitriiK]

This is what so frustrating, ridiculous and weird is - Google doesn't really know what exactly going on in their system. Thanks to multi-layered project management, machine learning etc.