Have you seen a recent traffic drop? Google update may be to blame.

Posted by Owen Powis on 15 Mar, 2017
View comments Search News
If you’ve seen a large drop in traffic since the start of March (especially within the last week) this might be very relevant.

Google has been moving away from occasional big updates to more frequent smaller updates for a while. So it’s becoming increasingly rare to see a large named update. However there have been a larger than usual number of webmasters reporting large traffic drops in the last 1 - 2 weeks.

Over at SERoundtable Barry Schwartz has reported having a number of webmasters contact him with similar stories. Looking through the complaints on the Google Webmaster forums myself, whilst some appear easily explainable, others not so much.

Many of the sites reporting traffic drops rely on ad revenue, but this doesn’t apply to all of them. I’ve also seen a few that have possible geo location issues or have recently updated their geo settings within the search console.

My feeling is that this is a couple of different updates which have happened close together and so a broader range of sites has been affected. Google has been typically non-committal on the issue, neither confirming or denying (no surprise there).

So if your site has been affected please do let us know in the comments. Especially as it doesn’t look as though we’re going to find out what’s going on from Google.

Recent articles

5 email segmentation strategies to use in your marketing campaigns
Posted by David Campbell on 5 June 2023
Highlights from Google Marketing Live 2023
Posted by Edith MacLeod on 29 May 2023
Google has completed its last mobile-first indexing batch switch
Posted by Edith MacLeod on 29 May 2023
How to use content syndication to improve your rankings
Posted by Daniel Anderson on 19 May 2023
Google Search Perspectives will showcase content from TikTok, Reddit and more
Posted by Edith MacLeod on 16 May 2023