Rankings just took a wallop in the last hour.

[Progauto]

Has anyone else checked their rankings today and noticed a big shift? We just got smacked by G big time.

[Progauto]

We're measuring using a few different tools. Right now if I'm looking with the Google Preview Tool, it can sometimes show me what the deal is. I'm sure it's not the most accurate, but a ranking drop of 10 pages isn't hard to measure :P.

If there hasn't been any sort of update, I'm pretty sure I know what the problems are otherwise. I think they may have just updated a disavow file for us.

Today, the ranking is slowly crawling back up the list.

[McTaggart]

I've seen some major movements re: the sites I monitor over last 48 hours.

[George.Fanucci]

I use GSERP.com as well as AuthorityLabs, GWT and GA, along with several other tools to track keyword performance :: day-to-day and month-to-month :: for several sites and many dozens of keywords.

It is very common to see individual search queries vary up and down, DAY-TO-DAY, by a lot in the SERPs. Sometimes they will settle down at a steady SERP ranking, sometimes not. There are so many variables —— What is Google doing today with fine-tuning of adjustments in the algo? What are your competitors doing? What are users clicking on today?

Rather than look at noise in your results day-by-day, the trends month-to-month are far more interesting and useful, IMHO.

UPDATE/EDIT ::

It's just my own speculation, but I think Google has built-in a "hunting" feature where the SERP position is tested, up and down, by quite a lot — before it settles on a stable place . . .

Are users clicking on your SERP result, and staying in your website, or are they immediately bouncing back to Google search to look for something better? If you could answer that, you may find reasons for the downward trends in your SERPs.

What, specifically, are you measuring? What tools are you using?

[Progauto]

Thanks for the response, Eric. When these major updates, or even smaller updates happen, do you commonly see an up and down  shift for a single page? Do they fluctuate and then settle in a spot, or is it usually a one way shift for pages?

[GlobeRunner]

For most of the sites that I monitor on a regular basis, we're not seeing any major changes in rankings. It seems as though they're always making changes to the algorithm, and there were a few days last week where I saw some dips. At this point, though, since it's only been a short amount of time, I would wait to see how it plays out.