Is anyone seeing excessive ranking fluctuations?

[seoman10]

Has anyone noticed an unusual shift in ranking fluctuations starting around 20 hours ago?

I have noticed some fairly major positive shifts on two different websites, interested if anyone else has seen the same thing.

[Jack_Jahan]

I have in the past week or so seen huge fluctuations. I've checked various algorithm sensors (SEMrush, Mozcast) etc. and for the industry we deal in there has been significant movement since around 12th January 2018.

[KevnJr]

We have seen fluctuations in our 4 sites, we consider it seasonal as it happens every year around the holidays and picks back up in mid January

KJr

[EGOL]

SEMrush Position tracking is showing a lot of false flux lately for a couple of reasons.

1)  They don't identify your position in the SERPs and report it as "not in top 100".  If you click to see the cache that they used to obtain the rankings your domain is there.

2)  Google has been inserting and removing a link to the image results at the top of many SERPs.   "Images for [your query]"   When present, SEMrush is counting this link to the image results as position #1 and the result is all results below are pushed down one position.  When not present, all of the results below move up one position.  You don't notice this very much in your visibility score if you are on the second page.  However, if you have keywords that rank in the top three or four it can make a huge change in your visibility score.

3)  Google does seem to be experimenting a bit and even losing track of a few pages for the keywords that they typically rank for.   So, yes there is a little more flux in Google, but the number changes in many of the tools are a result of contaminated data and bad data collection.