I too am seeing a drop (24th Feb) in my niches (automotive, arts, household) - comparing direct traffic to organic search reveals there was probably an update to the algo which lost me a few top 3 positions. Direct traffic is down 10% but organic for me is down around 20% over this same period (mainly for high volume keywords - low volume keywords are still providing steady traffic flows with no drop at all).
This matched the pattern I saw around 14th & 15th which I put down to the holidays but now I suspect something was being tested/rolled out.
Exactly my observations!
The 14th and especially 24th update were, in combination, possibly the worst I have experienced in 15 years.
The Ukraine impact was 10-15% max. The overall drop for me is approaching 40%. For sites that normally receive stable traffic with ~1-2 % variation week over week.
And its not just my oldest site - it is all of them at the same time (they dropped one by one between 24th and 26th, oldest first).
Ukraine effect made this more dramatic, but obviously Google is really pushing some broad ranking updates. In fact, it seems like they are almost doing no ranking at all, just dividing sites between two buckets - "trusted publishers" and "everything else". And in the "everything else" category is our websites, together with billions of auto generated spam, all with equal weight in the rankings.
This is so bizarre that I am event contemplating tinfoil-hat theories - what if, since covid, they have implemented emergency "EAT switch" they can flip whenever there is some global emergency and it is in "public interest" to have access only to "trustworthy" information from "quality sources"? Let's say they flipped the switch on 24th and all the mainstream news sites bubbled up etc. and they haven't turned it off yet?
Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2022
