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Was Your Website Really Hit by the Google March Update?
I’ve been scrolling through a ton of posts here for the past month and it seems like a lot of you think your sites took a hit because of Google’s March update.
Personally, I suspect that majority of these sites with traffic decreases are affected by issues unrelated to the update.
I've already reached out to a few commentor/posters here and have found the actual issues for them and they were not related to the update at all. All of them gave me negative comments and have such a negative attitude .
I'm sure there are sites that were actually negatively affected by the update but I suspect majority of the ones complaining here are not part of them.
If you think your website was negatively affected by the update, would you be able to include what you've looked at and how you came to the conclusion? I'm sure many of the people here can help.
😊
Edit: Since someone asked what the point of this post was, it's this:
I don't believe all the people saying they were actually hit by the update. It may be true for some of the people here but since this subreddit is catered to newbies, I believe most of the people complaining are actually affected by other issues.
If you think your site was negatively affected by the update, can you prove it?
Can you share you website and why you think it's been hit by the update?I've already helped a few people find other issues and yet to find some that can share a domain that was affected. I understand people may not want to share their sites, thats fine but I dont see anyone sharing a negatively hit site.
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1 Reply
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Dates/timeframes of update rollouts + drop = algo hit
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I wasn’t hit, but I’m just a home services provider, not a blogger / e-commerce site.
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Listen gaslighter, John Mueller admitted it. What are you talking about?
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Yes, smashed with Sept and March updates. It has gone from 2k clicks a day to 10 clicks a day.
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e commerce site, impressions dropped 95%.
semrush data all keywords gone -
Yes, long term ranking web saas with well ranked articles. Been though many updates over the last dozen years. Missed 2023 hcu updates. Took the opportunity to further clean up the site. For my trouble, we got hit in March 2024 and now down some 85% in natural traffic. Dates match, falling traffic patterns match.
Part of it could be all the garbage Google adds to the serps these days. Even rankings that remain do not pull in the same traffic as they did a year ago.
Basically, Google has stolen content and closed off ranking to many of those sites. They want you to pay for ads. If you are a big enough publisher, they will buy them off with content deals and leave small and medium businesses in the cold.
This didn’t happen overnight. The pieces were put in place over at least the last two years, probably going back to 2019 or so.
So if there’s a lot of pissed off people at Google, they have good reason.
So glad my work was stolen for ai overviews before Google deranked my site. Not every site hit was a scammy black hat affiliate site. A lot of
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No. None of mine were.
I’m curious to hear what you think actually caused their decline, however.
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I didn’t see any decline – but then again, I wasn’t getting many people visiting, either.
Having said that, there are at least a few articles I’ve written that show up on Google’s first page (within the top two or three recommended) even now. My suspicions have always been SEO and good robust content carries weight. For context, the average word count on my articles is around 2400
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Nope.. 🔥💯
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I lost my content writing job (I knew it was going to happen, but it happened a bit too fast). The company’s site’s traffic is down 85% as of now, going further down after the March update. 🙁
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when their traffic decreased almost overnight the same days of the update. and google admits that certain sites got hit. from reading the posts over the past month+ it looks like a majority lost traffic solely due to the update. this seems more of a phishing post than any actual facts around your discoveries.
you are asking for everyone’s domain. how about you give examples people you “reached out to” “and have found the actual issues for them and they were not related to the update at all” as I think everyone who read this posts thinks it’s bs
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No, to the best of my knowledge, having studied all our stats, I can honestly say that neither the March update nor any previous ones have had any negative effects on my 2 websites.
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For perspective, I own an agency as well as a couple personal blog / website projects. Our biggest customer that sells products online (which were thought to be immune to these updates) is down 50-60% year over year… with a definite marker in march as the start of the massive decline. THey don’t do shady stuff, they just sell to a niche client with almost no competition. but now random stuff displaces their 15+ year old business that has always been a reliable go-to for their particular client type.
Our biggest B2B client that doesn’t sell online but markets and has a blog, has stayed steady. As if nothing happened.
As for content sites – including our own, traffic is down 70%. It started March 4. so I would say that there are definitely sites that are impacted. Some of them had recovered from the HCU .. but then squashed 1000x over… in march.
<shrug> — what you gonna do? Suck it up!
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I find it interesting how so many people complain that they lost rankings on google, but using google it seems like the results it returns for everything is good. I’ve never had an issue finding things I’m looking for and I haven’t noticed much difference in the quality of results, if anything the quality seems better.
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An SEO news site survey found that 25% of small site owners said they were hit.
Based on chatter, it looks to me like the GOOD sites that were unfairly hit were informational.
Sites that didn’t get hit had:
– ecommerce
– calendar apps (appointments)
– recent news
– UNIQUE content
AI content doesn’t matter. Affiliate links don’t matter. It was whether your content could or could not be found elsewhere.
Also, the Google leak included a flag specifically to mark sites as “small.” We can only guess why they’d need that.
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