Possible Google Update on March 1
There have been some rumors and discussions of a Google ranking update from over the weekend. The changes appear to have started on Friday, March 1 and continued through the middle of the next day.
This latest suspected update comes on the heels of previous changes on February 27 and February 22.
All three algorithm updates, as of this date, are unconfirmed by Google.
There’s some speculation that the movement on Saturday was a reversal of Friday’s update, as found by MozCast:
FYI: Today's 108°F temp. on @mozcast is due to a reversal of yesterday's craziness. Those 19-result SERPs are nowhere to be found in last night's date. Will try to do a full write-up early in the week.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) March 2, 2019
But as you’ll see if you read through that Twitter discussion, a different analysis indicates no such reversal:
Don't think we're seeing any "reversal" within the dataset. For us, it looks like March 2 was a continuation of what we saw on March 1.
— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) March 4, 2019
From the highlights from the discussion on WebmasterWorld, some people are reporting losses big and small. You’ll also notice there’s a lot of focus on Google’s People Also Ask SERP feature, which seems to have gained prominence in search results for some queries.
However, not everything has been negative:
And, for what it’s worth, we’ve also seen pretty mixed results from these latest changes.
Google traffic to some sections of our website — like the homepage or certain sections of our blog — has increased by around 12%. At the same time, another group of pages has had organic traffic decrease by the same amount.
And while there’s nothing definitive, some website owners say they’ve seen a connection between these latest Google updates and their site’s backlinks:
Has This Google Update Impacted Your Site?
As is typical with so many Google updates there’s not a lot of concrete information to go off of in this situation. Instead, you should continue to focus on building a high-quality website, publishing useful content and tracking your keyword rankings.
Has your site been impacted by this recent suspected update? Any big changes to your rankings or traffic? Let us know!
