Thanksgiving Google Search Ranking Update Causes Big Shifts
It looks like Google may have rolled out another search ranking update over the past few days. At first, there wasn’t much talk about it, but today, more SEOs are noticing sudden changes, and some tracking tools are detecting unusual activity too. The changes probably started around Monday, November 24.
I waited to mention it because I recently reported an update on November 20 and thought this might just be the same one continuing. But now it appears to be something new.
Many website owners and SEOs are seeing big shifts in search rankings, traffic, and conversions.
We’ve seen a lot of ranking volatility lately: updates or major movements around November 20, November 12, early November (“Movember update”), Halloween, mid-October, and early October. Some discussions slowed down recently because Google removed the 100-results-per-page option, which affected third-party tools, but SEOs can still feel when rankings change, and they’ve been noticing it.
Because Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I’m calling this the Thanksgiving 2025 Google Update.
What People Are Seeing (SEO Community Reactions)
Here are some of the things SEOs are reporting:
- “Seems like an update started two days ago. Anyone else seeing changes?”
- “Definitely, my traffic is behaving just like it does during an update, and tools are showing it too.”
- “Big ranking drops, lower traffic, no conversions.”
- “Lots of movement, some rankings up, others way down.”
- “Massive shuffling happening.”
- “Traffic has tanked. Google Discover is showing older articles. Indexing is delayed.”
Semrush
