Google’s Search Liaison Urges Patience As The March 2024 Core Update Continues To Rollout

Google is urging site owners and SEOs to have patience as the Google March 2024 core update continues to roll out over the coming weeks. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said on X to wait for the update to complete before deciding on what changes you may want to make.

He wrote, “I would let the update complete before deciding if there are any fundamental changes you might want to make.” In fact, he said, “There might not be any to do at all,” and maybe whatever ranking declines you are seeing now won’t be there when the update is done rolling out.

As a reminder, the March 2024 core update started officially on March 5th, then we first saw ranking shifts on March 8th and 9th, then some reversals on March 12th and then more movement on March 15th. The update can take a full month to roll out, so it may go into April 2024.

Sullivan then went into what other changes or factors may lead to a site seeing less search visibility and traffic.

Your site seems clean and nice. Going through the site, I see [steak pie] as one of your featured recipes. You’re in the carousel and second in web links for that. That’s a pretty solid sign that we like your content.

If you were previously first, trying to move up from second by doing a lot of technical and content stuff wouldn’t be something I’d recommend. Second is super successful. Rankings can also change for various reasons, so you might move back up.

You might also look to see if there’s any seasonal change. IE: instead of looking at rankings, look at your traffic. If it was higher previously, what for? Perhaps you had some seasonal recipes a few months ago that people are looking for less. We have a page about debugging traffic drops that talks about seasonality here.

Here are those posts within context:

I would let the update complete before deciding if there are any fundamental changes you might want to make. There might not be any to do at all.

Your site seems clean and nice. Going through the site, I see [steak pie] as one of your featured recipes. You’re in the carousel and…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 15, 2024

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