Google March 2024 Core Update Released: bigger than before!

[mezzofanti]

What impresses me about Google is how they change things; one day, they are saying one thing, and the next day, they are saying another thing.

For example, for years, they were bitching about EAT and how that is important for any blog/site to have good rankings. And then, EEAT came, and they were bitching us even more.

And now, no more EEAT; it is not a ranking factor anymore.

So, if you are an MD or PhD with about page/paragraphs on your site, with a link to your LinkedIn profile, your university thesis, your professional accomplishments, certificates, etc. that doesn't matter because some dude from Quora and Reddit will outrank you easily because Quora and Reddit have God knows what kind of deal with Google.

And yes, I am pissed, and I needed a place to blow off some steam ...

 

[DanDanger]

Is anyone seeing any recovery?

I had 50% of our network wiped out over 6/7 March.
I saw 10% have a moderate recovery on 10 March.

11/12 March appears to plateaued with 40% loss of websites.

 

[MrApple]

My site lost nearly all it's traffic on March 7th
Kept going gradually down until the 9th, same for the 10th
Yesterday it shot back up to 50% what it previously was and today so far I'm getting regular visitors again so might continue going up again....

When my traffic went down I did mention on here Google indexed a further 81 odd pages a day or two later which I found odd.

I'm not touching anything until the end of the month and will be taking a good look at what pages/posts are generating the traffic - so far looks it like a mix of the newly indexed content and old - a few posts which were ranking in the top 3 have slipped

Just an absolute mess, there must be some method to the madness......

 

[sayonx]

My site lost nearly all it's traffic on March 7th
Kept going gradually down until the 9th, same for the 10th
Yesterday it shot back up to 50% what it previously was and today so far I'm getting regular visitors again so might continue going up again....

When my traffic went down I did mention on here Google indexed a further 81 odd pages a day or two later which I found odd.

I'm not touching anything until the end of the month and will be taking a good look at what pages/posts are generating the traffic - so far looks it like a mix of the newly indexed content and old - a few posts which were ranking in the top 3 have slipped

Just an absolute mess, there must be some method to the madness......

Those articles has IA?

 

[MrApple]

Those articles has IA?

Ai?

Nope..

 

[Morris M Nichols]

I have 4 porn sites from which 2 are old and 2 are new (this is screenshot of new one). I was getting around 20k visitors per day and on 7th march it went down to 6k visitors. All pages are indexed even keywords are there but at bottom. I lost all high ranking keywords of this site but the old ones are still same no change at all.

I have no fucking idea what to do now. Some users have mentioned that we should not to anything until update rolls out completely so i'll wait for few more days but what if it remains like that? What steps should we take? This is one of my money site so i'm kinda fucked rn.

 

[DanDanger]

I too am waiting until the end of this week.

The March 2023 spam update that also hit me hard, saw some sites recover overnight any time between 4-9 days.

All the sites that disappeared for me have been ones with between 50-100+ old legacy product pages that had very low quality fluff automated spintax content. It's this content that has taken the whole site down with it (sites that have great topical authority). So my plan is to delete all old useless fluff content and hope Google re-evaluates the sites in the next months update.

 

[Barnibonn]

A couple of my sites have completely dropped in traffic, the content there is written by a human. And on the site where a little bit of AI edits were made, there were no particular changes. Strange update.

 

[Carolus Rex]

Is this drop in traffic only for "new" sites? I mean, does anyone see the same for their 5-10 year old sites with high authority and a strong backlink profile? Don't think I've seen anyone talk about that at least.

 

[Bhikku]

Here's my feedback on the whole story since summer 2023:

I was heavily penalized by google for the november update and lost quite a lot of traffic, about 50%. Now it looks like I'm losing traffic again

If I go back even further I notice the following:
In summer 2023 I added a review / product markup topic to many of my articles if I had tested or compared a product. As you can see, I was even rewarded for this at the beginning and traffic increased by approx. 20%. Then came the review/spam - whatever update in september/november (double tap! ) and I lost quite a lot. But i also have to admit that the content before was relatively shit and i wouldn't read it either, i was wondering why it ranked at all anyway. But now much worse content is ranking in the top 10!

I then started to revise ALL the old posts and remove product / review. The content is much better and overall written for the user and not for search bots. From my point of view, I would be very happy about such content when I search for something myself.

Now I still have about 20 posts to revise. None of the articles have been deindexed, but I have been losing traffic since 6.3, albeit only minimally.
So what do I do now? Optimize the remaining articles, write more articles and maybe build up a few good forum links.

About the page:
DR 30, about 6 years old. I've been hit positively & negatively by several core updates. Now instead of 120 product review markups I have... about 10 product markups :-D

______________________________________________________________________________________________
My other page is relaxing with the same stats since one year - no drops, no gains. Also i put 0 new articles to it. DR: 8 :-D

 

[DozeX]

Shit sites deindexed by Google:
fresherslive.com
zacjohnson.com
lovethemaldives.com

Anything else?

hahah wtf, i read about lovethemaldives here on bhw some weeks ago, They had 3.2 mil organic search

 

[kalpana007]

Is anyone seeing any recovery?

I had 50% of our network wiped out over 6/7 March.
I saw 10% have a moderate recovery on 10 March.

11/12 March appears to plateaued with 40% loss of websites.

Did those 50 % sites had some common problem or issue which got the whole network affected?

 

[DanDanger]

Did those 50 % sites had some common problem or issue which got the whole network affected?

Yes, as per my previous post. They had 60+ legacy outdated thin content posts for old products. Ranging from 1-4 years old.

We have experienced no further recovery of our sites, so we are now experimenting with removing all old thin content and seeing if our algorithmic penalty is removed.

 

[kalpana007]

Yes, as per my previous post. They had 60+ legacy outdated thin content posts for old products. Ranging from 1-4 years old.

We have experienced no further recovery of our sites, so we are now experimenting with removing all old thin content and seeing if our algorithmic penalty is removed.

So what do you plan to do with those outdated posts? Were these ecommerce websites?

 

[DanDanger]

So what do you plan to do with those outdated posts? Were these ecommerce websites?

We plan on deleting them. They are of no use to the internet as they are for things no longer available. Plus the content is low value fluff.

Removing the content will give the sites less content and less incoming link juice from backlinks. But at the moment we have nothing to lose given they've been completely removed from serps.

We shall find out in 1-2 months if this plan works.

 

[Carolus Rex]

We plan on deleting them. They are of no use to the internet as they are for things no longer available. Plus the content is low value fluff.

Removing the content will give the sites less content and less incoming link juice from backlinks. But at the moment we have nothing to lose given they've been completely removed from serps.

We shall find out in 1-2 months if this plan works.

I think this is a wise choice, worth a try. Don't forget to 301 the url to either similar pages or to the category page or homepage, that way you will keep the backlinks at least.

 

[kolanut]

Is this drop in traffic only for "new" sites? I mean, does anyone see the same for their 5-10 year old sites with high authority and a strong backlink profile? Don't think I've seen anyone talk about that at least.

I’m also wondering about this myself. I have 2 old sites over 8yrs old all hand-written, no issues.

However, I started 2 new websites purely on AI content (GPT4) and both are also doing fine. One of the new site is over 1yr old while the other just 1-2 months old and is using an expired domain, articles which I published on the newer site on the 26th of February is currently ranking 1-10 and 20-50 on SERP.

I don’t believe Google penalized AI contents solely on them being AI generated, I believe it’s about the quality of the AI content and the usefulness of it all.

 

[nSnoopy]

Well, after a week of this google update, i noticed that with each day that goes by, more and more of my de-indexed posts from the last google update are getting re-indexed.
I also noticed that google is testing some posts on my website, ex: yesterday there were 3 posts that were getting more impressions, and today those have 0 impressions and another few posts get the same spike in impressions.

I know its all early to conclusion, but i have a feeling that at the end of this update, the traffic and rank will be back.

 

[Carolus Rex]

I’m also wondering about this myself. I have 2 old sites over 8yrs old all hand-written, no issues.

However, I started 2 new websites purely on AI content (GPT4) and both are also doing fine. One of the new site is over 1yr old while the other just 1-2 months old and is using an expired domain, articles which I published on the newer site on the 26th of February is currently ranking 1-10 and 20-50 on SERP.

I don’t believe Google penalized AI contents solely on them being AI generated, I believe it’s about the quality of the AI content and the usefulness of it all.

I'm not so sure the drop is connected to AI. My site I cover in my journey has almost no content, it's just a tool. But the number of pages and the short time I uploaded them is what I think caused the hit for me. A lot of the AI sites that have been hit are using some auto blogging software and upload 100-1000 posts every day. Now most of them got the manual action but others are just like me down 90% traffic overnight.

 

[dream411]

Here we go no more expired domains?