Today marks the emergence of compelling evidence regarding significant ranking fluctuations and adjustments tied to the substantial Google March 2024 Core Update. As a friendly reminder, this update officially commenced on March 5, 2024, and its full rollout is expected to span approximately a month. Brace yourselves for a flurry of ranking shifts during this rollout phase.
Google’s mission with this core update is clear: to curtail the presence of unhelpful, low-quality, and unoriginal content within its search results. By fine-tuning various components of the core ranking system, Google aims to elevate the most valuable information available on the web while minimizing subpar content. This endeavor includes scrutinizing webpages to determine if they genuinely serve users or were merely crafted to cater to search engines.
In 2022, Google initiated efforts to diminish unhelpful and unoriginal content, successfully maintaining it at minimal levels. The lessons learned from that endeavor have been woven into the fabric of the March 2024 core update. By scrutinizing web pages more effectively, Google aims to direct traffic toward high-quality sites while minimizing exposure to low-quality content. Collectively, this update, combined with previous efforts, is projected to reduce unoriginal content by a substantial 40%.
Additionally, Google has been actively combating spam for decades, relying on sophisticated systems and policies. The latest spam updates target manipulative behaviors that lead to the proliferation of low-quality content. While ranking systems already mitigate many instances of subpar content, these updates allow for more precise action under the spam policies.
Google tracking tools have already shown signs of volatility, particularly on March 8th, with even more fluctuations anticipated on March 9th. Keep an eye out for further developments on Sunday, March 10th as we continue to monitor this dynamic landscape.
Feel free to check back tomorrow for any updates!
Semrush:
Accuranker:
Mozcast:
SERPmetrics:
Cognitive SEO:
Mangools:
Wincher:
Algoroo:
SERPstat:
Let’s dive into the SEO chatter surrounding the recent update. The digital grapevine is abuzz with discussions across various platforms, including X, WebmasterWorld, and Black Hat World. With over 1,200 comments and counting, the community is dissecting the impact, sharing insights, and speculating on the unfolding changes.
“Traffic is terrible this morning. The Google vs spammers battle is more intense than ever. And they are not using precision munitions either. They are dropping nukes. Collateral damage is immense. Spammers are changing tactics. Reddit, Medium, Linkedin Pulse are turning into Blogspot style spam dumps. Quality of search continues to steadily decline. It’s Spamaggeddon!”
“Strangely, GSC shows a corresponding increase in indexed pages to around 150k for 1 ccTLD. It only has around 1200 pages to index. All noindex’s are checked and in order, so what’s going on, I wonder.
No manual penalties reported.”
“There is tremendous volatility on many queries right now. A guide of mine with several solutions on android auto problems is surpassed by news sites that give a solution that there was on a certain day a few years ago. Obviously this solution no longer works and is not valid for all the problems that can be had with the operation of Android auto, moreover these news dealt with only a bug of a version of Android auto. Once My article used to be among the top positions, rightly so Since it has all the possible solutions to try for solve.”
“I’m hoping that this is a Search Console bug too. But the other thing that my GA4 must be glitching too, because it also shows drop to 2 clicks per day. But…
I’m checking my Semrush, checking Hrefs numbers – they are all showing some changes (~10%), but no drop to zero or something like that. Hoping this is a glitch…”
“I am not seeing a huge decline in overall traffic, but this morning there is a big increase in traffic to obscure lower-level pages and also from unusual locations. I am also seeing single product pages with unusually high levels of visits from different unique visitors. It’s as if this one item suddenly rocketed to the top of searches and lots of people clicked it, then it dropped out of sight again. So I think there must be a lot of churning going on now as the pattern of visits is very different from the norm. The steady decline in converting traffic continues…zero serious inquiries from USA, UK, CA, AU or UAE…it’s like the blood being drained out of my business. I did get an inquiry from Mongolia though…no joke.”
“This remains to be seen, though many will believe it simply because Google said it. Instead observe the serps for evidence. I see numerous very high quality websites have taken a huge hit in the last few days. By high quality I’m talking about site’s created by professionals with degrees in their fields who have so much EEAT it is oozing out of their eyeballs. My observation suggests the facts don’t back up the claim about Google very easily penalizing AI sites. But we are still early in this update to come to any definitive conclusions.”
“USA traffic is -31% today, so something is definitely kicking in in the USA SERPS. My overall search traffic is actually up slightly, and UK, AU, CA, and most of Europe ex France is very high today.”
“I see a slight increase today, as opposed to the last 3 days and compared to the last 3 Saturdays – Saturday is an important mark for one of my sites. So, on this site I see a small increase.”
“Seeing a lot of sites drop total traffic i.e no impressions but page still shows on the index”
“All the URLs of my sites are indexed but the organic traffic from Google seems to have disappeared.”
“I’ve noticed a 70% drop in traffic on some of my websites since they started implementing this c#$@ on March 5th.
All of them are fast, clean, without ai and backlink spam, about 1 year old.”
Here is some updated SEO Chatter from WebmasterWorld:
“From yesterday. my impressions in GSC started showing again.
During update this website decreased from 3k impressions to 38 per day.
For yesterday, the data in GSC shows ~300 impressions.
And from today, I’m seeing visitors from Google again. I believe, it’s not a glitch, it’s a rollout of this update, the hope things will change positive in a few days.”
“My website is back in Discover and I’ve had better numbers since yesterday than I’ve had for a long time. My most important search terms have also improved significantly in the rankings, but I can also see that many other search terms have lost ground. Without the articles that bring in a lot of clicks via Discover, the traffic via Google would be rather poor.”
“my traffic today -23% compared to the same day last week.”
