Did Google’s 2024 March Core Update Kill Blogging?

The Google Core and Google Spam Updates launched simultaneously on March 5th. The core update took 45 days to roll out and left what can only be described as blogger carnage in its wake.

I shared my traffic across all my sites after the update first launched, and planned to share the results the moment it ended … but it seemingly never ended.

I watched as countless bloggers got manual actions, had their traffic slashed, or rode the SERP rollercoaster that was probably the most volatile I’ve ever seen.

Most blogging Facebook groups became funeral homes for the niche sites people spent years building.

… but I saw some hope in my SEO for Bloggers Facebook group.

Which made me wonder: did the update actually kill blogging? Or are the mourners just the loudest among the blogging community right now?

I ran a poll across my 16k social followers to get more answers, and I’m going to share them with you now.

Stick around till the end for a debrief on how my sites fared (with screenshots) and what I think really triggered the traffic losses.

The Google March Core Update Changed the Face of Google Search

Google has been causing massive shifts in the search results (SERPs) for most of 2023, but none hit harder than the Helpful Content Update in September 2023 (HCU).

Thousands of sites had their traffic decimated by the earthquake that was the HCU. And unlike past updates, there seemed to be no hope of recovery.

At time of writing this article, there have been no confirmed recoveries from the Helpful Content Update.

The March update hit like an aftershock that toppled many of the bloggers remaining standing after the HCU. Many prominent SEOs were hit with Manual Actions before the algorithm could even affect their sites.

The update said it was targeting unhelpful content again, but at a page-level. However, most SEOs have theories about how it was finding this unhelpful content.

Here are all the theories of what Google could have been targetting that I’ve come across:

• Guest post links (and collabs and link swap links)
• Purchased links / link farm links
• Using any keywords
• Too high of a % of posts ranking for high volume keywords
• Ads
• Affiliate links and affiliate disclaimers (disclaimer: it’s illegal not to have an affiliate disclaimer on posts with an affiliate link. Don’t be scammy and remove it to try to rank. It doesn’t work, anyway)
• Keyword density
• Using expired domains
• Exact match domains
• No niche
• Too much of a niche
• Using Table of Contents
• Having FAQs
• Having comments, or conversely not having comments
• No social links / profiles
• No author schema

I’m sure I missed some.

Basically, anything a blogger could possibly do seems to be seen as a problem – which I get!

This update definitely targeted multiple things, which makes it really hard to tell what the main factor(s) is/are.

I have my theories, which I’ll share at the end of this post after I share my sites details – you’ll need to see those to understand my theories.

Google’s official statement hasn’t changed since the beginning of the update, so I’ll quote part 1 of this series:

“According to the document on the March update, and their FAQ page about it, here’s what you need to know:

• The helpful content system is an amalgamation of many signals and systems built into the core of Google
• Primarily works page-level, but there are some site-wide signals
• If you have high levels of unhelpful content on your site, it may be causing other content to not rank
• You don’t need to wait for another core update to fix a negative score necessarily, but they also don’t guarantee you don’t have to wait.”

How Are Bloggers Actually Doing Post-March Update

I ran a poll across my Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook (about 16,000 followers combined at the time) on March 9th and asked: “How did you do with the March update?”

The options were “Up Over 20%”, “About the Same”, “Down Over 20%”, and “Completely Obliterated”.

Limitations: Unfortunately, due to the limitations of some of the platforms’ polls I could only ask 4 questions so I had to keep it general. I also couldn’t make it 100% anonymous which I fear dissuaded people from voting. It also meant that I couldn’t verify what people’s traffic was to start, their primary traffic methods, etc. So this is a very cursory snapshot of self-reported traffic shifts.

The overall results were:

Traffic Change	Number of Blogs (Self-Reported)
Up Over 20%	55
About the Same	144
Down Over 20%	100
Completely Obliterated	79
Total=	378

I was surprised to see that “Down Over 20%” and “Completely Obliterated” weren’t the highest results based on all the negative posts I saw on social media.

But what was most interesting was how significantly the results varied by platform.

Here were the results across Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, and Threads:

	Facebook	Instagram	Youtube	Twitter	Threads
Up Over 20%	31	7	2	15	0
About the Same	95	19	7	21	2
Down Over 20%	57	11	8	24	0
Completely Obliterated	19	9	19	32	0
Total =	202	46	36	92	2

2 Social Media Platforms Showed Positive Growth

Facebook and Instagram both had the highest reported numbers of bloggers whose traffic stayed “About the Same”, and Facebook had the highest reported number of blogs that had a 20% or higher increase in traffic.

Facebook was the first spot where I saw some hope for bloggers – and it happened to be in my own group.

In my free Facebook group, SEO for Travel Bloggers, I allow “Mediavine push” posts. This is a pretty common practice on Facebook for people who are at 48,000 sessions or above to get a traffic boost so they can apply to Mediavine a few days early.

My free group usually averages 1 a month. From March 6th to May 6th, there were 10 posts for Mediavine pushes (screenshots from the group, each linked to the relevant site):

Does Facebook Create Better Bloggers?

Short answer: no.

I don’t believe any social media channel “creates” better bloggers.

But I do think there are major strategy differences across platforms, especially based on the niche areas I find myself in.

Remember, these are all my audiences self-reporting their traffic.

My Twitter audience come primarily from the “niche site” world, which tends to be (and I’m generalizing here) more bullish on quick win strategies.

My Instagram audience are largely Instagram-first bloggers who are pivoting to grow their traffic off-Insta.

My Facebook audience is the most diverse, made up of bloggers at every age and stage, with varied strategies. But most seem to come more for “blogging” (which I’ll loosely define here as a more personal, “I’ve done the things but I’d like to make a bit of money talking about them”) verus the “niche site” world.

All of the Facebook groups I’m active in – mine included – had a very negative attitude post-March update so I was even more shocked to see mostly positive results in the poll.

My Youtube audience for my “Community” posts is very small as this was one of my first ever. And my Threads audience was only about 300 people at the time, so it’s a too small of a pool to be statistically relevant.

I’d love to see more popular creators on those apps ask the same questions of their audience for us to get a better cross-platform picture.

(If you do so and want a backlink please send me the details and I’ll include you in this post with a backlink to your site/study. Cheers!)

Did I Survive the March Update?

I’ve been promising to share my numbers for weeks, but between moving across Canada and then going on holiday for most of May, I never got around to it. Finally I have a minute, so let’s go through them all.

All of these screenshots are March 1st to May 1st, 2024.

Travel Blog

The March Update hit this blog HARD, but it’s not unexpected.

As I mentioned in my predictions for how my sites would handle this update, this site is a prime candidate to be hit.

I haven’t worked on it in forever, it’s a disorganized mess, and I ran some unfortunate tests on it that I fear got it blacklisted a bit (I had 2 hard hits in the winter to the traffic thanks to buying some spammy links as a test and indexing content I shouldn’t have).

The site has stayed basically flat on Google traffic, and it’s Discover traffic equally flatlined.

It’s definitely disheartening, and for most of March I feared even opening the GSC. My mental health wasn’t good so it was like kicking a person when they’re down.

I just stopped checking.

It has had some surprising results post-May 5th update. But I ultimately haven’t done anything to rehab it’s SEO yet.

She Knows SEO

She Knows SEO is my favourite site and the one I spend the most time on. And it shows from the GSC results.

It stayed pretty consistent throughout the update, with only the errant peak/valley at random when something would click on Discover or everyone was searching a certain SEO strategy to “recover” from the updates.

I’ll admit, I was worried for this one, since it has “SEO” in the name.

I figured, if Google is trying to get rid of SEO as an industry, they’d probably wipe out any sites with “SEO” built into the branding.

Or that any post about AI would get wiped off the face of the SERPs.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, it’s doing better than ever (and has continued to do better than ever!).

It lost some tangential keywords that I wasn’t targeting but gained some spots for higher volume keywords and affiliate keywords.

I suspect the site survived largely due to the type of links, user-focused topic clustering, strong social clicks, and that every article is clearly written by me, for my ideal audience.

The success of SKS through the update is one of the many reasons why I don’t believe Google is targeting sites with ads, affiliate links, free themes, or that are on WordPress.

It’s literally all of the above, and it’s doing great!

In fact, during this update I’d turned my Raptive ads up as a test – which was probably not great timing.

But it didn’t negatively impact my rankings (I got lucky on that one!).

Ottawa Things To Do (My Build in Public Project)

I got scared for this site around March 9th when it started to take a dip.

But I had forgotten that Winterlude and the Rideau Canal’s seasonal traffic were just ending.

Winter is big for this site, so it stands to reason that the impressions and clicks would go down.

But they bounced back as some of my hiking posts for spring/summer started to take off again.

The site is original content (although some is AI assisted). I did a full audit earlier this year, going through every post manually. It has a few guest post links, but not many – and I’ve never done link swaps or bought links to it.

I noted in my original predictions that I’d be surprised if it got hit. Well, I’ve been right for a third time that both it and SKS are standing strong.

Pet Blog

My pet blog has seen a similar dip to my main travel site (although much less dramatic as it never had that much traffic from Google to begin with).

There are some posts – the ones I wrote and that one of my more advanced writers wrote – that are still ranking very well, and even that gained some rankings.

But many took a dive – especially the ones I noted in my first post in this series were assigned to my beginner writers who I had neglected training properly (totally my fault, not theirs!).

This site had great news links (thanks, Linkifi!). It has no ads, and barely any affiliates.

It strengthens my theory that a lot of this update is keyword-based. This site targeted easy keywords that weren’t properly user clustered, and that largely lacked EEAT.

I was already considering rebranding the site because I can never remember the name of it (which is super embarrassing when you go on niche-specific podcasts to promote it and say the wrong one… not that it happened to me twice).

But the fact that it had great links made me nervous to abandon it.

I’m kind of grateful this happened so I have no excuses not to rebrand to a name I can actually remember!

My Core Update Theory

I’ve been tracking sites throughout the core update – mine, my students’/clients’, and various random sites – to look for any clear similarities in sites that were hit or that survived.

At first, I thought it was going to be a link-related update after dozens of public blogging figures got manual penalties for links on their site.

Niche Site Lady notably shared hers, and her theory that it relates back to a guest post she did for a friend years ago.

But I’ve been very public about doing guest posts, and I never got one. I’ve also seen many sites who are always in guest post request groups, writing for others and getting them for their own site, that weren’t impacted by the update.

I do expect that a mass of spammy links or too many guest posts could be a factor in this update, but I don’t think it’s a smoking gun.

The next most common suggestion was AI content.

Again, I’ve been very public about using AI to assist in writing content (although I’ve also been very publicly anti-one click AI writers, so maybe that balanced it out for me), and the sites I actually work on are fine.

You’ll notice many sites still ranking in the SERPs are spammy, AI generated nonsense right now. So it seems like, if that was Google’s goal, they missed the mark entirely.

As for all of the theories about ads, affiliate disclaimers, Tables of Contents, and FAQs: just no.

I believe a certain type of site that Google is targeting would have these qualities. But I don’t believe it’s why sites got hit.

My sites that are doing great have all of these in spades!

Every article on SKS starts with an affiliate disclaimer, even if it doesn’t have affiliate links. Then it has a Table of Contents. And most end with an FAQ section with extra questions answered – in schema form no less!

I get the instinct to look for an easy fix like this, but as many have proven by changing these small features, this update is bigger than one formatting issue.

I expect this is a case of correlation doesn’t equal causation.

The Main Ranking Factor

Which leads me to my main theory: Google targeted sites that were trying to “win” top spots, over helping their audience.

Now that’s a very reductive sentence to summarize my theory, so let me explain before you get mad that your site did have helpful content, but it got tanked.

The sites that I have seen get hit by Google had something major in common: they were keyword focused.

The majority of their traffic came from SEO, and they had a really high average position on GSC because they only wrote for keywords they felt were easy to rank for.

I know, this has been the SEO advice for a decade. So I’m not blaming anyone for taking that approach – it’s what drove my two sites that got hit.

The content ended up not making much sense because I was spending so much time and energy answering “easy” questions that I knew would win me positions quickly.

In the case of my main travel site, many weren’t even that related to travel.

SKS and Ottawa Things to Do both have clear topic clusters, and posts that are all about helping the user. I mean, it wouldn’t make much sense to have a site on Ottawa things to do without having a post about those activities, right?

It doesn’t rank for it, yet I made sure I still had it from the outset because a user would be very confused to come to this brand and not find it.

I made sure both of these sites have a complete funnel of posts so someone can go through the whole AIDA funnel (this is a common sales/marketing funnel for emails or sales pages) on my site.

I also think that helped me with the click factor and longest click that we found in the leaked Google API documents.

I keep people on my sites, and moving to new pages of these sites, longer than my competitors who were looking for traffic to a single post.

So that’s my theory: Google targeted sites that were targeting Google.

It didn’t matter if they were helping the audience in every single post, because they weren’t looking at their site holistically, keeping them on the site, and writing content that’d help their audience even if it couldn’t rank on Google (potentially even at the expense of their SEO rankings for other posts).

These sites also typically followed a “passive income” model. They weren’t looking to be a brand. They were looking to be part of a portfolio of sites that would print money from ads and affiliates thanks to easy rankings.

The more active income approach sites have fared far better – and that doesn’t just mean sites that offer services or products. It’s a tone you can tell from the site itself.

I do also assume the content needs to actually be helpful and fresh.

I’m seeing lots of sites who never did a content audit and had great content get wiped, largely because the content doesn’t seem helpful anymore – even if it’s something evergreen that probably didn’t need any update.

What’s the Plan?

Great question!

This is going to be unpopular, but SEO is still going to be my focus.

I do believe it still works – as you’ve seen from 2/4 of my sites, the votes, and all the posts in my Facebook group.

But I no longer believe it’s the only traffic source to go after.

Y’all may remember I was getting exasperated owning multiple blogs, and telling everyone under the sun not to start multiple sites in summer last year.

Well, I’m going back to that: build one brand, and build it very well.

Get multiple traffic sources. Build brand recognition. And take the time to own your income streams with products and services.

It’s not the “easy win” that SEO with affiliates once was. But I don’t believe that really exists anymore.

Where we used to be able to get $50k months just from ads and affiliates with SEO, I now see us moving towards more “active income”.

The sites I’ve seen succeeding – mine included – are more active-income focused and have a core brand. The content is user-focused, and written around a niche topic with properly clustered keywords.

I’ve been adding in micro Facebook groups to my strategy for 2 years (basically tiny, very community focused groups that convert at higher rates for clicks, affiliates, and product purchases). I’ll be leaning into those more.

I fell in love with Youtube at the end of 2023, so I’ve been running case studies in the B2C space to learn more about succeeding on the platform. I think it’s a great way to strengthen a brand, especially as the videos often rank on Google above text results now.

Then, once I have traffic, I’m driving people to an email list.

I’ve set up 1 year welcome sequences for sites that I can’t write fresh emails each week for due to time limitations. This ensures people are getting emails, but I’m not expanding more time every single week writing new content.

I’m also working more on creating products for each site so I can monetize them faster.

I’m going to run tests on other traffic driving methods, like paid ads on Facebook, bundles (I’m hosting my first one soon!), and migrating domains.

I do plan to sell off more of my sites as I’m honestly exhausted of trying to give my all to too many things.

All of my efforts come back to one thing: “what can I do to help my audience the most?”

That’s where you should start with whatever you’re doing for your business, be it blogging or otherwise.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns about this update, you can post them in my free Facebook group. Be sure to answer the questions or it’ll auto-reject your request to join.

I did a more step-by-step explanation of the updates for my Profitable Part -ime Blogger students.

If you’re interested in checking out the video, you’ll want to join the Profitable Part-Time Blogger program here.

Read More of My Best SEO Tips:

• Free SEO Content Writing Checklist for Bloggers: 25 Essentials to Include
• 28 Best AI Copywriting Tools in(SEO + Blogger Tested!)
• 1:1 SEO Coach Services with an SEO Specialist and 6-Figure Blogger
• Services
• Shop All of She Knows SEO
• How Many Blog Posts Before Traffic From an SEO Strategy?
• What are Snippets? (SEO Guide + Definition)
• What is the Ideal Blog Post Title Length for SEO?
• 55+ Blogging FAQ Answered: Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About Blogging Professionally
• URL Structure Best Practices: Why You Should Use SEO-Friendly URLs
• How Many Keywords Should I Use for SEO?
• Are SEO Keywords Case Sensitive?
• Is Google Analytics Free?
• 13 Best Laptops for Blogging (Guide from a Blogger)
• Essential WordPress SEO Plugins for Bloggers
• Are Blogging Courses Worth It?: Should You Spend the Money
• 37 Advantages and Disadvantages of Blogging
• Basic SEO for Travel Bloggers: 19 SEO Tips to Scale to Full-Time Income
• SEO Outreach: What It Is and Why It’s Vital for Bloggers
• Blogger Personality Quiz: What Type of Blogger Are You?
• Accepting Guest Posts on Your Blog: The Ultimate Guide 2023
• What’s Your SEO Animal Mascot?
• Vlog vs Blog: Which Online Business Should You Pursue?
• Google E-E-A-T for SEO: Ultimate Guide for Bloggers
• Do You Need Videos for E-E-A-T? From an SEO Expert
• Google Reviews Update April 2023: Not Just for Products
• Should You Be Worried About the March 2024 Google Core and Spam Updates?
• 5 Quick SEO Wins You Can Do Today
• How to Write Alt Text for SEO and Accessibility Wins
• How to Export Data From Google Universal Analytics Before July 1, 2024
• When to Change a Blog Post URL: 7 Common Scenarios
• This is The Biggest Google Search Algorithm Leak in History. Here’s What it Means for Bloggers
• Did Google’s 2024 March Core Update Kill Blogging?

Like this post? Share it with others!