Beginning on March 19th, there has been continued and significant industry chatter discussing a possible Google Update.
Traffic has been wild and many users are noticing significant swings.
This update is unconfirmed. But, if Google does confirm it, we will bring you the news.
It’s possible as well that some of these are just normal swings in traffic for these sites.
The following industry chatter over on Webmaster World has been observed:
5:14 pm on Mar 20, 2021
Things are pretty bad today. I see clear signs from an update yesterday.
6:43 pm on Mar 20, 2021
Can confirm. Pretty significant demotion again. Maybe even up to 30% or more.
It just keeps going down and down.
Expert & specialist written content, ultra super fast site, regular media mentions and citations by big mainstream sites (no manual intervention, all legit-only links). Truly nothing helps at all.
I guess time has really come to put everything on hold.
It occurs every 5 days more or less, weekend or not, every 5 days. The day of the week doesnt seem relevant, almost all the time its 5 days, sometimes 4 days. Maybe this is a re-evaluation every 5 days? It seems quite solid.I dont have a physical shop, this is e-commerce, online, 24/7. I get what you’re saying about impressions but throughout 2020 until December the position was fairly solid. What has been happening is that every time the keyword drops from position to 2 to position 20 in one of those dips for example the number of impressions rise by over 40%. Quite odd.All I can conclude is that it started since the core update in December. Perhaps this is the new norm.
Was there a major Google update over the weekend?I had a significant shift in the SERP rankings of one of my websites.
Something definitely happened after this weekend. Spam emails coming in, and no more conversions (right after a pretty good weekend). Also noticed a new small decline of the Average Position curve in GSC, which is a bit worrisome since looking back at March 2020 it was the exact opposite.
I wouldn’t call it “quiet”, at -37% searches and -79% direct traffic it’s a disaster. My USA traffic is -69% this morning. Oddly, I gained a few spots in the SERPS, but last week I lost two to three high volume terms. It seems to be cycling a lot, but overall trend is strongly down for about the last 8 days.
Whatever happened this weekend was the first positive shift I’ve had since 2016…and it was a major swing.The only thing I did differently was removing all link ads on this one website before the deadline.
Curious, seeing the same plunge down a cliff curve in GSC…guess what…. almost the exact same curve as the September 2020 mobile indexing issues ^_^I’m sure everything is fine though.
Continued March 19th Google Update?
The industry chatter continues to reflect wide-ranging implications from the update on March 19th.
It remains to be seen exactly what effect this will have on traffic, rankings, and industry volatility.
