Google Deranking Itself

So I haven't seen this mentioned after looking around because I don't think many people noticed, besides perhaps the Google employees themselves who had to fix the mess. It seems Google has been having a tough time getting rankings right as every SEO would say but it's really made clear with the fact that during the month of August, google.com got completely deranked from the google branded search term in the US, while the UK variant was being served as #1 - boosting the traffic to an insane extent.



First time it's ever gotten such traffic from the US region:



And on a global scale, we can see this is the most traffic it EVER had:


And we can clearly see the effects of this with the drop here during August:


Notice how it only ranks a random inner-page second while the root domain google.com simply cannot rank during this time:

And again we can see the overall declines from this:


Of course this information doesn't affect us at all nor our daily lives... But it's pretty interesting to see & wonder just what went wrong in the algorithm for google to derank itself for it's own branded term / be unable to serve it's own root domain in the SERPs while instead picking a variant for a whole different region - something that's never happened before.

Cool little observation. Maybe it's a fall back when the us algo fails, UK version is next best. Doesn't seem it happens all that often? lol weird

Google's algorithm is gonna take itself down with the rest of us

This update caused Google to encounter many problems, greatly affecting keyword rankings.