Today is day 10 of the Google March 2024 core update rollout and Google March 2024 spam update. We believe we saw the core update touch down on March 8th and 9th and some possible recoveries or fluctuations on March 12th. Now I see more signs of Google search ranking volatility likely related to the core and spam updates today.
Let's not forget the huge number of manual actions released about 9 days ago.
That being said, I am starting to see signs of more ranking fluctuations and volatility as of Friday, March 15th - likely related to both the core and spam updates.
Google did tell us that the core update would have multiple systems within it updated over the course of the month rollout - so maybe here is another system being updated?
I see these signs from both the third-party Google rank tracking tools and also from some spikes in chatter within the various SEO communities.
Google Tracking Tools
Let's start with the tracking tools and show you what some of these tools are showing today. Note, not all are updated as of this morning, so I will come back in later today to update some of them:
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the early chatter I am seeing from the SEO community this morning across WebmasterWorld, Black Hat World and comments here. It is early, I expect more and more comments to be shared...
Traffic continues to collapse and at this rate it will reach zero within a week. I just need to figure out if my site is spammy or useless. Definitely worse than the sites with automatic translation and paa that are in front of me.
I'm getting wild swings with periods of masses of visits followed by near complete shutdowns. Totally unnatural.This is the result of an ultra-greedy American company being allowed to have such a huge control over the earnings of millions of businesses throughout the world whilst it imposes it's own Google Tax on the entire Internet.
Pretty wild days. 80% of ranks disappeared into <100, after a couple of days ift popped back. Then tanked again.We use automation in text generation but based on a data tool that secures on time accuracy of data. The text itself is helpful, user metrics are nice. Native speakers in live tests never realized that there was any kind of automation going on. Our site only posts 3-5 posts a week and has overall 700 pages. In a rolling cycle on a quarterly we 410 outdated articles that do not have any value nor traffic from readers. This is far away from spamming. There is no AI content on the site.
The most interesting part is that those articles where our editors edit the automation for the better got downranked and a lot of articles where this was not made still rank. It is a niche project and in some segments there are only 1-2-3 sites that cover the topics as we do are only touch it a bit in another context. Now Serps look tike random content. Far from helpful.
If we would exclude the text automation there would be no difference. 3-5 articles manually written per week with the same bloddy content. I don´t get it where the problem is.
It's already happening on my end and it is Friday morning. The past 24 hours has been awful.
tomorrow is Friday. I expect another big shuffle
For the second time, the site loses all keywords beyond the TOP100. March 9 and 14.
Last 48 hours my traffic in a non-commercial niche has almost bottomed out to the lowest it's ever seen since 2006. No manual actions, no ads on the site, and is a traditional forum.
Are you all noticing anything big shuffling this Friday?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
