NEWSFLASH: March Core Update Rolled Out

Hi, it's Ed here with a special episode. Last night, the 26th of April, google announced that the March core update had finished rolling out, and the strange thing is it actually finished rolling out on the 19th, a week earlier, but they didn't tell us for a whole week. If I had my tinfoil hat on, I'd say that's possibly to do with the fact that Google had their quarterly earnings out on Thursday, a couple of days ago. Maybe they didn't want to cause any negative publicity before then Not that I'm sure that a core update rolling out would hit the mainstream news, but anyway, yeah. So they've left it a week before telling us. So we've now got a confirmed date as to when the core update actually finished. So we can now tell that anything that's happened between March, the 5th, and April, the 19th, that is the core update. So we're now in a position where, if you've been hit, you can actually go and look and see what effect the core update has had and we've got a stabilized ranking like a final ranking positions and final ranking places from the end of that update. Now, if you survived the update, seen improvements from the update, then congratulations, well done. I'm not sure that anybody will really know what you've done, but if it's, if it's worked, you're in a good place, congratulations.

If you've seen losses, then now is the time that you can actually go make some sense of your analytics. What you need to do is look at specific areas of your site to see if there's any specific areas that have been hit. Now I know a lot of people have been hit. It's going to be hard to learn anything when you've been completely wiped out, but the interesting ones are going to be anyone who's lost a portion of their traffic say 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent of traffic because those are the sites where we can find which pages have been affected and which pages haven't, or which sections of the site haven't been affected. They're going to be the really interesting ones where we're going to find information out. So if anyone's got a site like that, I'd be very interested in hearing from you, um and I'm sure it's going to be lots of people now starting to put information out and looking at um sort of case studies of where they think they've learned something.

Now, in terms of my own sites, um, I've had a bit of a weird one, because the sites that I earn money from have all been fine, if anything slightly ticked up a couple of them. So in those ones I've come through fine. But I've got some other sites that are very similar Same niches, same themes, same design, same information architecture but are in other countries and I've not monetized them. If they are monetized, they've only got some basic ads on, and some of those have seen wild swings, very wild swings over the period, and one in particular just got almost completely wiped out sort of 95% of traffic. Now, it wasn't getting a lot of traffic to start with, maybe only a couple of hundred people a day, but it's now just dropped off a cliff. Now this is saying to me that a lot here is not to do with site design. Difference between these sites is these are newer sites, the ones that got hit. They have very few backlinks. So to me, although Google keeps saying backlinks are less important nowadays, there definitely seems to be a backlink difference between these sites. That's the thing I'm looking at and considering. Is there a backlink difference there? It may be completely wrong, but it's just some first impressions that I've got from those.

Now, if you have been hit, google are actually asking for feedback from um website creators. They put a form up. I'll put a link to this form in the show notes so you can find it. And yeah, they're looking for feedback on um how things have gone. Now they are asking people to provide the query that they search for and what the issue is. So they're saying there's options.

That, which is my page, no longer ranks in the top 10 results this query. My page is in the top 10 results of this query. My page is in the top 10 results, but no longer as high as it was. Someone else's page should be ranking in the top results of this query so I think you can report for other people. All of the top results are generally poor for this query. So obviously you've got queries that you're watching that you're not directly trying to rank in but you think are poor. You can report them. A few or some of the top results are poor for this query or another issue, and then there is an area to put in um reasons why you think a page should be in the top 10 and any other details.

So if you've got a site or anything that you do want feedback, I would encourage you to do this. Is it going to make any big difference overnight? I don't know. They've done this before. Remember, at the time of penguin and others, you know we had issues. There was a similar form put up. We did put our feedback in. I don't know if it helped, but I think it's worth doing. It's better than just sitting on it not saying anything. So I do encourage you to go and fill that form in if you've got something that you want to say.

Um, and I think that's it for now. I think the other thing is obviously on may the 5th, that's when the second part of the spam update algorithm is going to come into place, which they're aiming to hit the parasite seo, um, community work, um, and it'll be interesting to see what happens then. I mean that again may shake things up all over again. So, um, yeah, so that's it for now. Just a quick episode here, just quickly to get this information out to you. I don't want to sit on it for a few days and wait. It's important to get this out now, so hope it's been.