Google Algorithm Updates - 2023 Ongoing Discussion

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We're doing alright.

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My baby-site has jumped from an average of 270 active users a day over the past two months to 800 active users today, all organic, so that's pretty nice. Won't get too excited until the dust settles.
 
ianovici said:
So, until now I've only found some possible reasons that maybe, just maybe, triggered some kind of penalty. But it's weird.

If I was really, really picky, I would say my pages were more optimized than my competitors. But they are not spammy in any kind of way. Will modify them to be more SEO-unfriendly to be more like my competitors. Idk...

I've spent a lot of time looking at technical stuff and all is good. Does not seem to be a problem. The domain is well over 3 years and it's been stable with small variations of positions.

Prior to getting hit, I've been ranking #1. Now, I'm nowhere to be found. Sometimes the trackers find my site in the 1-20 position BUT it seems it's only for that particular instance.

Now to the weird stuff.

From February 24th, it seems the website has not been crawled anymore. But, in fact, it was. Edited 2 pages and Google crawls and indexes the changes and serves them. But, when inspecting a page, it displays Feb 24th as the last crawl. No spam message, no error, nothing.

The results have partially changed. Some local sites moved in. The results are just garbage and are not even on the topic.

For some keywords, the top 20 changed drastically. The new ranking pages were all written before 2020. Some of the pages have 150 words articles on a topic that requires way more.

It's not about EEAT, as some of the new sites are stuck in the past and have not been modified in any way since 2021.

Edit: No AI content. Some larger competitors also got hit in the same way.
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Anything changed after the very recent core update?

illmasterj said:
Yes, near exact 25% lift on my main site as well. Now let's see if it holds.
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Traffic more than doubled from Wednesday on an experimental site of mine. Hope this trend continues
 
@KhairujjamanS The site in question is still hit. I'm not going to work on it for now. I've scheduled 15 posts and will leave it for now.

Once the update finishes, ill post what happens with the other projects.
 
Results seem vaguer now, I cant get my search answered without quotes ex.

does ssd write speed matter for gaming - Answers = forbes style sites saying why ssds are great - not at all my question
"does ssd write speed matter for gaming" - How much does SSD write speed matter for gaming ... - Redditv - quotes answers my question immediately
 
tyealia said:
Results seem vaguer now, I cant get my search answered without quotes ex.

does ssd write speed matter for gaming - Answers = forbes style sites saying why ssds are great - not at all my question
"does ssd write speed matter for gaming" - How much does SSD write speed matter for gaming ... - Redditv - quotes answers my question immediately
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On a set of keywords with "best" outdoor stuff, now only news sites rank in the top 10, money.com, miamiherald.com, rollingstone.com, and so on. On over 60 different keywords that I track.

Yeah, really on-topic. The results were way better before this update. Maybe they will change it, idk.

I feel like I'm more screwed with each update.
 
I had a 25% drop in Google traffic on one of my main sites (insurance niche)

On the 13th and 14th, I was actually up big. 20-30% more Google traffic. Thought my hard work was finally paying off.

Then on the 15th the traffic started to tank.

Hoping the update isn't finished and I shoot back to where I was before!
 
Pretty happy with this update so far.
I'm up somewhere between 60% and 100% (exact figure obscured by a trending topic).

The gains are largely coming from KWs that dropped in the Oct and Dec updates coming back.

This is the most consistently positive result I've had from an update, so either it's great news or Google is about to play an epic 'not' joke on me.
 
zak said:
Pretty happy with this update so far.
I'm up somewhere between 60% and 100% (exact figure obscured by a trending topic).

The gains are largely coming from KWs that dropped in the Oct and Dec updates coming back.

This is the most consistently positive result I've had from an update, so either it's great news or Google is about to play an epic 'not' joke on me.
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I had one of my Ecom websites get crushed in December, but I fully recovered and saw huge gains with this latest update. At the time, I saw quite a few websites lose rankings and traffic, especially my local based clients.

Is anyone else seeing huge losses with local based websites?
 
I seem to have had a drop of 30% around the 14th, despite rankings being mostly the same.
 
bernard said:
I seem to have had a drop of 30% around the 14th, despite rankings being mostly the same.
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Same here. I have a 30% traffic drop, but can't really pinpoint it to any keyword(s). They all are the same.
 
bernard said:
I seem to have had a drop of 30% around the 14th, despite rankings being mostly the same.
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funlol said:
Same here. I have a 30% traffic drop, but can't really pinpoint it to any keyword(s). They all are the same.
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Same here, about 30% traffic drop from 14th without losing any rankings on a small site, or at least the most important ones. From stable 1,100 daily to 800. According to Semrush, all snippets are still there... but who knows. No "best xx for xx" articles, only info and how-to. I've never experienced this kind of drop before, so I'm officially joining the club of those who have felt the wrath of the algorithm.

One more interesting thing. From Dec 22 the traffic grew rapidly, but the time on page sunk by about 50-60%.
 
I guess this is because of the update but still have to check if you are experiencing the same thing.

I got like 50 new pages indexed the last week but under performance on GSC my pages are dropping off instead of counting up.

Is that a regular thing?

Do Google bots and crawlers stop doing there job during an update? :smile:
 
The Google March 2023 broad core update has finished rolling out.

It started on March 15th and finished on March 28th, lasting 13 days and 7 hours:

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MrMedia said:
Any recovery?
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Some, not a full recovery yet. 20-25% up from the bottom. What I've been doing is working but there's always the question of "Did I get it into place early enough for full credit." There's two more tasks I realized I should do, too. After that, it's out of my hands. I plan on sharing everything in my monthly update in a few days once all the data is in for the full month.
 
Huge volatility today for me, consistent with the Red sensor jump of semrush. 4 sites down walking back some big gains I had at the start of the update.

High range
Position changes for numerous sites!
5.7/10​

 
Looks like this was mostly an index clean up and reweighting.
"keyword here" results are way down across the board.
On webspam heavy keywords and brand names I've found a few where its down over 50% compared to
February.
 
I'm starting to see some weird stuff, the first two pages are related to the keyword, 3rd and beyond, just jibberish.

The results are completely unrelated to the keyword. The top 20 are old posts from last year and are on point with the keyword but the rest are not.

It's weird as I know several competitors on this keyword in the last 2-3 months and they were ranking on 10+. It's like the top 20 reverted to "a backup" and the new posts are nowhere to be found and context is ...well out of context.

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What I've noticed as a user rather than an SEO is that Google is losing some of it's ability to understand questions in the way it used to. An example (that still works, mind you) that I always remembered was a query like this: "what is the movie with the guy in the rabbit suit" which, for anyone who's seen it, knows it's Donnie Darko. Google understands that too.

But it's failing otherwise for me to deal with long-tail queries. They largely keep resorting back to the short tail results or misunderstanding the question, causing me to have to rephrase my queries in different manners, hoping I can divine the magic incantation it'll understand. It's very much like trying to figure out the right prompt for these AI chats. And it did not used to be like this. It was like wizardry for a point in time where I was simply amazed at Google's natural language processing abilities on the query side.
 
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