# Google updates and notes

> Google ranking update markers on charts, and your own notes: where to add them, their scope and where they show.

Page: https://serplyze.com/docs/google-updates-and-notes

Time-series charts in Serplyze carry two kinds of markers. **Google updates** come from Google and show when a ranking update rolled out. **Notes** are yours and record what happened on your side: a launch, a migration, a campaign. Together they let you read a rise or a drop against what changed that week.

## Google update markers

- **Source.** The Google Search Status Dashboard, section Ranking. Serplyze reads its public feed once a day and keeps the incidents that are updates. Outage notices are left out.
- **Types.** Core updates, spam updates (including link spam), helpful content updates, and any other ranking update Google lists.
- **On the chart.** A diamond on the date axis marks the first day of the rollout and a light band covers the rollout. An update still rolling out has a band up to the last drawn day.
- **Tooltip.** Hover, focus or tap the diamond for the update's name, its rollout dates and the link **Details on Google Search Status** to Google's own incident page.
- **Hiding them.** The **Google updates** entry in the chart legend hides or shows the markers. The choice is remembered in your browser.
- **Dates.** Updates are placed on US Pacific calendar days, the same days Search Console uses.

The markers appear on the Traffic chart, the rank tracker charts, the keyword page, the page detail, the AI search chart and the 90-day chart in the Content findings side panel. Report PDFs print them with a legend. [Ask Serplyze](https://serplyze.com/docs/ask-serplyze.md) lists the updates in a period when you ask why a metric changed.

### Google update impact

For team members, the tooltip of a completed update also links to **Google update impact**, a page that puts every project of the workspace side by side: the days before the rollout began against the days after it ended (14, 28 or 56 days each), with the same days a year earlier for seasonality. It describes what happened during the update, not what the update did.

> **Plan:** The update markers are on every plan. The Google update impact page needs the Agency add-on and is never shown in the client portal.

## Notes

A note is a short text on a date or a date range. It shows on charts as a flag, and a range note also as a band.

### Add a note

1. On a chart, click **+ Add note**, then click the day on the chart where the note belongs (or choose **Or pick a date**).
2. Write **What happened?** in up to 500 characters.
3. For something that ran over several days, tick **Date range** and set the end date. A range can span up to two years.
4. Choose a **Category**: Launch, Content, Technical, Migration, Campaign or Other. The category sets the colour.
5. Under **Show on**, choose the scope.
6. Leave **Visible to client** on, or turn it off for an internal note. Click **Add note**.

You can also add notes from the project's **Notes** page, reached with the **All notes** link next to a chart, and from the **Notes** card on a page detail.

### Scope

| Scope | Shows on |
| --- | --- |
| Workspace | Every chart of every project, and the Dashboard |
| Project | Every chart of that project |
| Group | The chart of that keyword group in the rank tracker |
| Keyword | That keyword's charts |
| Page | That page's chart on the page detail |

A chart shows the workspace notes, the notes of its project, and the notes of the one group, keyword or page it is about. A keyword chart does not show other keywords' notes.

### Who can add notes

- Members with edit access to a project can add, edit and delete its notes. Viewers can read them.
- Workspace notes can be written by owners, admins and members who can edit at least one project.
- See [Team and access](https://serplyze.com/docs/team-and-access.md).

### Where notes show

- On charts: a flag on the start day and, for a range, a band. Hovering a day lists its notes. The notes entry in the legend hides or shows them.
- On the **Notes** page: every note of the project plus the workspace notes, newest first, with filters for category and scope, a search box and **Export**.
- In reports, PDFs and share links: only notes with **Visible to client** on. The tooltip of an internal note is marked “internal” for your team.

## Other markers on charts

Two more markers are drawn in the same way, but you do not create them as notes. Logged [actions](https://serplyze.com/docs/actions-and-impact.md) appear on every chart of their project on the day they went live. [Backlinks](https://serplyze.com/docs/backlinks.md) appear on the charts of the keywords they are linked to. Both are read-only on the chart, and their tooltip links to the action or to the backlinks screen.

> **Limit:** Notes are entered by hand; Serplyze does not detect site changes for you. A marker next to a drop or a rise shows that two things happened at the same time, not that one caused the other.

## Read next

- [Actions and impact](https://serplyze.com/docs/actions-and-impact.md): Log the SEO changes you make and see a before/after comparison of the pages and keywords they targeted, set against the whole site's trend.
- [Reports](https://serplyze.com/docs/reports.md): Build a report for a project, schedule it by email, share it with a read-only link and save it as a PDF.
- [Team and access](https://serplyze.com/docs/team-and-access.md): Roles, invitations, per-project view and edit access, seats and working in several workspaces.
- [Traffic](https://serplyze.com/docs/traffic.md): The Traffic screen: site totals, breakdowns and the full lists of pages, queries, folders and page groups from Search Console.