Weekend Google Bug Demotes Website Rankings

Unexpected Glitch Impacting Generic Top-Level Domains on Google

A number of discussions on various Google support forums have highlighted a potential bug in Google’s algorithm. The bug seems to cause certain generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to vanish from Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) entirely. This issue has been tagged as the ‘Google Weekend Ranking Bug’. It appears to primarily affect certain types of domain names, with those affected finding their sites invisible on Google’s SERPs over weekends, even when searching directly by site names. Notably, this issue seems to have been identified by Olesia Korobka (@Giridja).

The Specifics of the Google Bug

The bug mostly affects gTLDs, also known as ICANN-era generic top-level domains. Among the most affected are domains with extensions like .academy, .car, .care, etc. A disturbing pattern of this bug seems to involve sites’ traffic crashing drastically over the weekend, only to recover on Mondays. This trend appears to have started around November.

This does not seem to be a quality issue, as such problems usually affect rankings every day of the week, throughout the month. The Google Weekend Ranking Bug only affects certain types of domains, and only on weekends. It does not seem to be a case of simply declining traffic over weekends, but a complete de-indexing.

Community Responses

Several site owners have reported experiencing similar issues, with 64% of related threads emerging in January 2024, despite the first thread being reported as early as November 24, 2023. The reports indicate a strange pattern of de-indexing during weekends.

A publisher with a .consulting gTLD observed on January 3rd, 2024: “Our company website seems to be disappearing from Google search engine results every couple of days, resulting in a significant loss of traffic.” Another publisher with a .club gTLD reported a similar crash and rank cycle in late December.

Other reports on the forum from December 2023 till January 2024 also echo similar complaints, with websites mysteriously disappearing from the SERPs over the weekend and reappearing by Monday. Website owners have been left puzzled, with no manual actions, security issues, or critical reports on Google Search Console to explain the sudden dips in traffic and visibility.

Historical Precedents

Historically, an issue dating back to the early days of Google saw domains stuck in a ranking loop, being de-indexed for a month, then returning for a week, only to disappear again. Referred to as the ‘Legacy Domain Penalty’, the issue was believed to occur due to the domain’s history of spamming.

Google’s John Mueller noted: “The other thing that I’ve very, very rarely seen, is that a site gets stuck in some kind of a weird in-between state in our systems in that at some point our algorithms reviewed the website and found it to be absolutely terrible and for whatever reason those parts of the algorithms just took a very long time to be updated again.”

Although there seems to be a similarity between the gTLD rank-crash pattern and the legacy domain penalty, they seem to be distinct issues. In particular, the former predominantly impacts keyword gTLD domains that are not associated with past spam and therefore shouldn’t be a quality issue.

Final Thoughts

This issue could be a bug in Google’s system, possibly introduced in November, causing unintended side effects. While Google has yet to respond, understanding the problem could aid in developing solutions.

For more information about this bug and the ongoing discussion, please explore our content obtained from the source of Digital Sunbird.

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