Google Releases March 2023 Core Update

[engine]

Google has said it has released its March 2023 Core Update, and the rollout is expected to take a couple of weeks to complete.


[developers.google.com...]

WebmasterWorld March 2023 Google Search Observations [webmasterworld.com...]

[RedBar]

Do I assume today's seemingly huge traffic reduction is to blame for this?

I write seemingly since I want to check my server logs tomorrow to qualify this.

[ichthyous]

I'm not seeing a big reduction in overall traffic, but big drops to some landing pages with more competitive terms. The one-hit wonder page visits to lower-level single content pages continue, but that kind of traffic rarely converts like the more determined searchers looking through lots of content in one genre.

[ErrlyBird]

Displeased. Traffic was finally recovering from the last update. I was wondering why we were struggling again today. Our rankings are all over the place.

[BigKat]

This explains why Google removed the top sidebar block of product ads for some product searches. Google tends to trim down the ads a bit before these larger updates. Still I don't see any change in traffic or sales from Google. There's simply too many ads for these updates to have any impact on the abysmal organic traffic Google sends us.

[EditorialGuy]

Interesting. After increases over the last month or so, our editorial travel-planning site saw a modest decrease in Google traffic right about the time that the Product Review Update was concluded. (Never mind that our site has hardly any product reviews.) Many of the top pages for our long-established site's two leading topics took a slight hit in terms of Google rankings and traffic. It was almost as if someone had dialed down the importance of the "E" and "E" in "EEAT."

Today, Google traffic is looking a lot stronger, so I figured something was going on even before I saw this announcement. Maybe "E" and "E" are getting more Emphasis again! Time will tell.

[KaseyM]

Huge drop in traffic for the past week...

[MayankParmar]

Hoping for the best. So far, nothing.

[Treud]

Drop or Not all I have since weeks are Zombie traffic. If I have a drop at least I’ll save up Bandwidth :)

I serve Europe & US for delivery mainly, and I receive lots of traffic from Pakistan, India…

[anubitez]

good grief, still recovering from spam update October, doing well each month getting back but today when this update occurs i noticed a few visits from google corp
g3doc.corp.google.com

anyone knows what g3doc is? and why google employees be visiting a site from it. couldn't find much about it. its either good google reference my material, or its very bad in my mind.

[soweluyy]

My website has just been doing SEO for 3 months, and the rankings have increased steadily every month, and many of keywords have entered the top 20. However, due to the impact of the update, a large number of my keywords have disappeared. In the next few days, I will Is there any chance of the website being restored?

[Jez123]

Here we go again. FFS. Traffic holding so far but conversions gone. I don't even need to verify there's an update any more. I just know.

[Nutterum]

Europe needs to wait at least a couple of days before any change is visible. Esp in Central and Eastern Europe. If you see a big shakeup its very much likely not part of the core update. But if I see it happening across the 10-ish countries I work on then I might be able to assess what they changed and where (broadly).

[Aduc321]

I doubt that we have to wait a few days in Europe, here in Germany my rankings jump massively.

[Robertus]

There are already noticeable reshuffles in Poland. Again, the end of the month will be more modest in the number of conversions. Eh :(

[Martin Ice Web]

Yesterday we saw a big drop in the morning but traffic made a big race and it catched up to "nromal" levels.
Today traffic is even stronger but conversions are almost gone.

And i i can´t figure it out but with every update not only conversions go down but the remaining conversions are from very very low amounts.

What we can say to the core updates is that they only changes the vertical between big players. One update favored news coops while demoting tech sites. The next update does it upsite down. There is not a real change or balance. It is just 0 or 1.

[ichthyous]

Yesterday we saw a big drop in the morning but traffic made a big race and it catched up to "nromal" levels. Today traffic is even stronger but conversions are almost gone.

I saw the exact same thing yesterday...very low morning traffic followed by a bit increase, ending the day positive. USA traffic is the laggard, as usual. It's as if Google targets your most important or closest market and makes sure you don't get steady traffic or conversions from that market.

With regard to conversions, I am noticing a strong correlation between the stock market performance and international news, and the number of new inquiries. When the market was better in January it was stronger...new inquiries have been non-existent since the beginning of February, and especially after the 8th or so.

[Micha]

I don't know if it's because of that, but according to Xovi, my site's ranking is increasing, but the traffic is very meager today.

[Martin Ice Web]

With regard to conversions, I am noticing a strong correlation between the stock market performance and international news, and the number of new inquiries. When the market was better in January it was stronger...new inquiries have been non-existent since the beginning of February, and especially after the 8th or so.

This is true for inquiries from business but it does not explain the lack of sales/inquiries form private buyers.

We know that google is able to switch between good and bad traffic within seconds. IMO just to keep users clicking on ads. On ther ohter hand i have never seen something converting as bad as google ads.

[ichthyous]

This is true for inquiries from business but it does not explain the lack of sales/inquiries form private buyers.

Of course it does. At least for buyers of high dollar value / high price point and luxury items. Their net worth is tied up in assets. For lower priced widget items there is a lot more elasticity, but when the markets tremble my buyers go quiet.

USA traffic is following a similar daily pattern...it drops off at 9am sharp and maybe has one spike before 5pm...then upward after 5pm. During this time period the ads are loaded up to the Nth degree because more ad buyers have them scheduled from 9am - 5pm.

[strummer19]

I'm in Europe
Major drop in trafic since monday (-70%)
Discover and News disaprears day after day

[Martin Ice Web]

About -60% this morning. Full zombie traffic. Our amazon sales +88% over night

[mosxu]

What on Earth is this traffic? See one buyer and 50 zombies even that only buyer probably dropped because he/she has special needs.

[RubicCubed]

About -60% this morning. Full zombie traffic. Our amazon sales +88% over night

I'm not surprised at your Amazon bump. Nearly half the ads I'm seeing in Google point to Amazon. Shoppers will have a very hard time finding anything but Amazon ads in Google. Also Google gives Amazon the top organic spot much of the time too. If I didn't know better, I'd think Google owned Amazon and was shamelessly plugging their own business into the serps like they do with Youtube.

See one buyer and 50 zombies

This has been happening to us for months. Does not matter if our ranks in Google get better because the ads are starving organic of traffic. Better for us to rank fifth in Bing then number one in Google. I think Google is just dead and probably not worth wasting much of our time on because they just want to drive us out of business taking every dollar they can.

[ChokenBako]

-10% traffic loss on my site. Huge level of zombie traffic, because there is suddenly no interaction on the website with comment function.

[ichthyous]

I saw a -13% drop in USA traffic yesterday, search was +5% overall, so the drop is mostly USA search. And I agree 100% that the huge numbers of ads is really killing prime traffic and we are left with the dregs. This morning I check on my phone and there were four huge 'sponsored' ads in a row, then a block of six links to pages with images, then a local search box and then the first organic listing. My site was #1 in the local search and then #3 in the search listing...but what does it matter, they are so far down the page very few are seeing them.

[Seologe]

In Germany, it looks like sites with Google ads are among the winners and sites without ads are among the losers.

[BigKat]

See one buyer and 50 zombies

Check the IP address of that one potential buyer. Here's the type of buyer Google is sending:

Purchase made by a buyer on a VPN, billing address of a UPS store, disposable email address and shipping to a different but local address within a 30 minute drive. Instead of shipping UPS at a cost of around $20, the buyer could have chosen to pickup for free. We shipped the order despite our obvious concerns, with signature required. Nobody was available at 8:00 PM last night to sign for the package and the second attempt will be made today. My gut tells me this will be returned to us by UPS next week.

As I noted in the March update thread, Google's traffic shaping continues to evolve. I think all the ads have siphoned off so much organic traffic that Google is allowing more (much more) questionable traffic to search/crawl their results and is directing the bulk of this questionable traffic to organic results to keep us drinking the "Google is so great" Kool Aid. This would explain why we are now seeing Google referring an exceptionally high amount of VPN, Cloud and host traffic to our site with a notable absence of traffic coming from IP addresses of genuine ISPs. Our company has stepped up its efforts to monitor this garbage/scammy traffic Google is sending, and it looks like many orders originating from Google will be shipped with a signature required if not first blocked or cancelled. We are vigilant in monitoring fraud, returns and those events which cost us money. If this is the way Google is going to play, by sending us mostly garbage/scammy traffic, Google's users may find they are one day ineligible to purchase what we sell.

[RedBar]

Today my global site has settled to its 2023 average after a bumpy 48 hours.

UK hotel site +30% for the month with all areas doing better than expected, keeping fingers crossed.

[yollo03]

My gsc stopped updating on 14 March, Anyone experienced something similar?