More Google March 2024 Core Update Ranking Volatility

As the Google March 2024 core update hits the 36th day of its rollout, we are seeing more ranking fluctuations and volatility being reported both by the Google tracking tools and within the SEO community through a spike in chatter. Maybe this is the last wave of the update before it is done?

This is a weird update with lots of ranking systems within the overall Google core ranking system is being updated. So we are/were expecting numerous big ranking volatility throughout the rollout. We were also expecting the update to take 3-4 weeks to roll out but now we are into week 5!

SEO Chatter

That being said, here is some of the chatter around the new volatility spotted over the past 24-hours or so from WebmasterWorld, social media and the comments on this site:

The update is still in progress. There are still small and medium-sized sites left to disappear or replace with expert forums

Similar here. It seems that tracking tools out there are still seeing instability going on though, so….. :

german serps are now flooded with Kleinanzeigen ( former ebay Kleinanzeigen), Aliexpress, marketplaces from big companies, shops i would never ever buy from.

Very high volatility on all my sites. Local and global websites, in several languages. End of the march core update?

Looks like USA and UK traffic are clamped down hard again this morning…-54% and -30% at 9:30am. Traffic to my home page is -76%! Let’s see if it suddenly shoots upward toward the latter part of the day as has been the trend. These ‘updates’ are killing off my business for weeks at a time…

Yesterday,Tuesday 9th April, my global site had three very unusual occurences. It is very rare that it has a one hour period of zero traffic whatsoever, yes it has occurred in the past especially on Xmas Day however yesterday three times in 24 hours it had zero traffic at 00.00 – 01.00, 11.00 – 12.00 and 22.00 – 23.00.

Furthermore its traffic looked very similar to the mess it was a few months ago i.e. mostly single page views. USA / Canada traffic was way down and looked very spammy whereas most of the other traffic looked normal.

So far today it’s looking messy as well plus US trafic is almost non-existant, hmmm…In-depth logs here I come.

we are seeing this lack of traffic too. But not this long time periods. More 10 to 15 min.
And we see a traffic pattern that has not been seen for some month now: a short rush on a single item. Like 10 to 15 visitors in one second. In most cases it is safari browsers

I’m noticing the same too. Mass visits on a single post for a few weeks now. However, the traffic is very unstable even today, one hour is good or higher than last week, while the next hour the traffic is much lower than the previous week. The AI Disaster Continues

Ditto here. The roll on continues.

I see the same thing here. In addition, the pattern is currently emerging that traffic generally drops from 2 p.m. and suddenly rises very sharply from 6 p.m. onwards.

What is unfortunately also noticeable is that the number of posts in Discover that are pure advertising is increasing significantly. Especially about strange medical products

Google is definitely cooking something new. It’s not your regular shuffling. They haven’t rolled it out yet as I can see that version of the SERPs maybe once every 15 times I search but in the past, when that happened, that version became the real thing after a few days. Hard to explain it but I am bracing for another hit

this is for my other site that wasn’t hit. I checked it and for the main keywords, it was on the bottom of 2nd page. Again, if I check the sites normally on Chrome or Firefox that is the latest version, I see no changes. But a very old Firefox shows the change every few times I search, like something that is propagating but not rolled out completely yet.

.@rustybrick I’m guessing the March Core Update is still going? Seeing some pretty big fluctuations over the last 24-hours or so.

— Taylor Kurtz (@RealTaylorKurtz) April 10, 2024

Google Tracking Tools

The Google tracking tools show some levels of volatility over the past day or so but it does not seem as extreme as the level of chatter within the SEO industry. Here is what the tools are showing now:

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