Google Search ranking bug is now resolved

Google has fixed the ongoing search ranking bug that kicked off around the same time as the release of the August 2024 core update. Google wrote, “We fixed the issue with ranking. There will be no more updates.”

Here is the timeline of this issue:

Google initially wrote, “There’s an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that’s affecting a large number of search results. We’ve identified the root cause and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout. Next update will be within 12 hours.”

Google took over four days to confirm the issue was resolved, but as I noted, John Mueller wrote yesterday morning on LinkedIn, “Unfortunately the team isn’t quite happy with calling it complete just yet (I don’t think there’s any visible effect anymore though), so we said we’ll update again in 2 days.”

Why we care. We covered a lot of the ranking changes we have seen over the past weekend, related to the August 2024 core update. But now that the ranking bug is fixed, you may want to give it a day or two and see where your site lands now. Also, keep in mind, the core update rollout will take about a month to be finished, so rankings may change over the course of the coming weeks.