How to Beat the March Google Update: Data from 5,000 Sites

Excerpt

Despite the dramatic headlines about the March 2024 Google update, an analysis of over 5,000 sites shows that the overall impact was minimal. The data reveals no significant trends based on site size or content type, but does highlight the importance of maintaining a clear content focus. Sites that covered a broad range of topics saw a 26.4% drop in traffic, while focused sites actually saw a 6.2% increase on average.

Published Date

Apr 11, 2024

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Mack Grenfell

If you've been following SEO accounts on social media recently, you’ll probably have seen some of the headlines about the Google March update. Sites being de-indexed, significant drops in traffic, AI-written content being targeted - it’s been easy to think that this is the end of SEO.

But here's the issue; those headlines don't tell the whole story.

In fact, they're a prime example of selection bias, where the most dramatic stories get the most attention. To move beyond the bias and really understand what's happened in this update, we need to look at the data objectively.

That's exactly what I’ve done at Byword. I’ve crunched the numbers on data from over 5,000 of our users' sites to see how they've been affected, and how factors like site size and topic have played into traffic changes.

I’ve even found a unique factor that appears to correlate strongly with the sites that have seen drops after the last update.

So, let's take a look and see what the numbers really say.

The Data

For this analysis, we anonymized and aggregated top-level stats from pre-prepared Search Console reports in Byword.

This means we're looking at real traffic data, not just estimates like some other tools use.

We compared month-on-month traffic for over 5,000 sites from February to March 2024, scaling the data to account for the extra days in March and discarding data from sites with fewer than 100 monthly sessions.

The Results

So, did traffic actually drop from February to March?

Perhaps, but barely. The overall drop across all sites was just 1.5%.

The image below is a histogram of the data, i.e. a graph which places each site into a bucket based on its change in traffic, and shows the number of sites in each bucket.

The y-axis shows the number of sites in a particular bucket, and the x-axis shows the bucket limits, measure in percentage change in traffic (from February to March).

Looking at the distribution of traffic changes across domains, it's clear that the vast majority of sites saw no sizeable change. In fact, 78% of sites had less than a 20% change in traffic, which is well within the sort of fluctuations that most sites see on a monthly basis.

What About Site Size and Content Type?

Some have claimed that the March update was designed to shift traffic from smaller sites to larger ones.

Our data doesn't support this.

The graph above breaks down February to March traffic change, split by monthly site click volume. The small sites are on the left, with the big sites on the right.

While sites with a million-plus monthly clicks did see a small increase, there's no evidence that the smallest sites were hit the hardest. The numbers are so small that site size likely played no role in the update.

We also used an AI model to categorize sites by content type, based on their homepages.

Again, there were no clear trends indicating that Google targeted specific types of sites or content. Some verticals like Food and Cooking fared slightly better than others like Business and Finance, but nothing conclusive.

The Surprising Finding

Here's where things get interesting.

When we initially ran the content type analysis, we had a "Not Applicable" category for sites where the LLM couldn't determine a clear content focus.

These sites, which covered a broad range of topics, performed significantly worse than all other categories. They saw a 26.4% drop in traffic between February and March, significantly underperforming all other categories.

This finding aligns with the advice I've given since launching Byword: focus your content on specific niches.

The temptation to cover every tangentially related topic is strong with AI writing tools, but it's a risky strategy. Every Byword site we've seen hit by previous updates was guilty of this.

Re-running the numbers without these unfocused sites, we found that overall traffic was actually up 6.2% month-on-month. The remaining 82% of Byword sites had a fairly positive month, despite the post-update panic on social media.

Key Takeaways

So, what can we learn from this?

Don't believe the hype. Selection bias means you're more likely to see horror stories than success stories after an update.

The March update was pretty uneventful. A 1.5% drop or 6.2% rise (depending on how you slice it) is nothing to write home about.

Focus your content on specific niches. Trying to cover every topic under the sun is a recipe for disaster, even with AI tools.

The March update may have caused some SEOs to lose sleep, but the data tells a much less dramatic story.

Keep creating focused, high-quality content, and don't let the scary headlines distract you from your long-term strategy.

Mack