March Core and Spam Update Analysis: What Changed and How to Recover

okay let's see how we get on with this stream here we go okay so we are live all right this okay we will begin shortly let me just send out the live stream to everybody first and then we will shortly begin with my analysis video don't worry it's looking pretty good so far oh okay publish publish publish publish and one more publish for good measure wherever it is here and we need to be in Couer Discord

as well okay cool okay we've already got some viewers coming in I'm going to open the stream I'm going to turn off notifications on my phone and then we are double cheing one more thing because I have not replaced the thumbnail I think how do oh oh well hey guys hello Yi hello Shane hello Rolo hello Josh okay so as long as the stream is looking good um I don't really care so much about the featured

image though we would love to figure out how to change the featured image after the fact it's not happening oh well I can hopefully go in there and change it after that so let's just give a a rundown of of the March core and spam update analysis let's jump into things give you guys a breakdown cuz I don't want to be um wasting too much time here because I literally in an hour's time got to go

get a flight so I will be uh leaving to go to the airport in 1 hour's time directly after after this okay perfect so we've got we've got a fair amount of people on the on the live stream already so we're going to begin so welcome everybody Welcome to the March call and spam update analysis video this is broken down into one video One live stream that is simply because Google despite you know years and years

ago mat cut specifically saying that he would never like to release updates simultaneously because it's bad for the ecosystem it's bad for algorithm updates it's bad for their tracking and the understanding of the changes and a load of other reasons they've recently been doing it a lot more often right so this is like the third or fourth time now that they've done overlapping updates so it's just too difficult realistically to be able to pinpoint which algd

dat affected what yes we can go off of Google's documentation and say okay well if it's the spam update then it's more likely to affect spam and if it's the core update it's more likely to affect this but it's just too difficult and we kind of lose ourselves in the data trying to split the data at that point right so it's better off if I can very very simply very easily put the data in together all

in one go so and again is this this is working right as long as we are live because I can't currently see the chat properly it's not coming up unless here we go okay hello to deal SWOT hello to Josh okay so the live chat is coming up and everything looks better however for some reason the live stream window capture does not seem to want to do it okay so I'm just going to have to change

to a yeah it's not showing presentation okay cool yeah I thought so I'm going to have to just change to a display capture so here we go screw it everybody there we're now in the video hopefully we can see this now live there we go okay cool we are in okay awesome so restarting going back from scratch again this is like the second third time I've ever live streamed on YouTube and it's pretty difficult to get

presentations for some reason on PowerPoint to to work on here so onto our presentation um like I was saying it's too difficult to split the analysis of the core and spam updates so I'm not going to do that in this video I'm just going to say what they affected as if they were the same update because otherwise it's too convoluted it it conflicts with data it affects a lot of things right so as with any algo

analysis and as with all of my algo analysis so far correlation and causation are two different things it does not necessarily mean that everything is a direct ranking signal or everything that has been changed has got a 100% overview of that change being factual right this is a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to date science however I've got 16 years of experience with Google I've got 16 years of experience with Google updates I've dealt

with every variation of penguin I've dealt with panda I've dealt with hummingbird I've dealt with coffee I've dealt with them all right all of the major updates that Google's basically ever released throughout its history as a company I was there I was analyzing them I was dealing with them I was sometimes dealing with the headaches of dealing with them as well um as well as the fact that it's also based this entire analysis on my Niche

white my Niche wide data and my sitewide data Trends so there a lot of analysis across entire niches and across entire sites that is also then reinforced with our single variable testing data and single variable testing literally means what it says on the tin it means that you put a single element on a page that doesn't exist against any other pages except your own testing Pages for a random query didn't exist prior and if those pages

go up or down then you can correlate those signals with this specifically as well okay awesome there we go it's now showing okay perfect if you are analyzing this update yourself or these updates I should say yourself bear in mind that again everything is going to be Niche level or site level if you're only analyzing it at that level right take all of your data with a pinch of salt because I always take my initial data

with a massive pinch of salt I always try my hardest to make sure that I'm not corrupting my opinions and my findings early on in the process and I try to look at the single variable testing last so that it reinforces that data and then once I've done all of that I'm then reinforcing it again with my Network and my community of SEO experts and professionals that I've got around me and I've built up some of

the biggest names and the best names in the industry at their respected Fields even you know some of the biggest names in the industry that we might fundamentally disagree on how you approach SEO like Marie Haynes and Glen Gabe but these people are still in my network we still talk we still show each other data repeatedly about these updates and things and that again helps massively reinforce My Views opinions and Analysis of these updates so what

was actually affected and again I don't really care what Google says at this point their documentation is a load of nonsense it's factually incorrect in certain places and I've tried my hardest not again not to corrupt my opinion and that data based on biases and one of the biggest biases that I think people corrupt their opinion and their data on these updates with is reading Google's own documentation we're reading what Google hopes to see as its

algorithm update not what it is actually seeing right and that's why I think it is probably a bad idea to be reading the documentation before you've done a lot of the analysis because it's going to corrupt and it's going to give you biases around that analysis so then we have a continuation of the February and the September updates so from what we can tell number one obviously in September it's called the September hcu but actually the

September hcu kind of started in August and we really started seeing the effects from the hcu in August despite it being announced and declared in September the exact same thing has happened here where we've started actually seeing the effects and it maybe has been tested in February and we've seen the full effects come into play when the update has rolled out in March I'm getting a lot of DMS about all this as well hopefully it's all

good though okay so as I said it seems to be a continually downgraded effect so it seems to be that hcu has hcu affected websites with the the hcu in August and September has seemed to be a continuation within the February and now the March updates here so it doesn't seem like the anything changed it just seemed to reinforce that classification which again Google did actually say that to be fair to them it said that they

were baking in that classifier into the update and it really did seem like they were honest in that specific case so in terms of what actually was affected the most obvious one unfortunately every single update for the Last 5 Years Authority won again Authority is up it just seems to me like the major way or if not maybe the only real way that Google has been dealing with Spam in any real seeming uh seeming ability to

do so has just been jacking up Authority every single update which has resulted in obviously a lot of Publishers being very pissed off with the fact that they're losing so much traffic and a lot of sites that have got these large Authority sites kind of manipulating the game and that's why this parasite update has been happening more recently every single e-commerce query that I have been looking at because again we we manage around 20 e-commerce sites

at my family business has been seeing Authority win every single one every single time we have been analyzing e-commerce queries since February all of our queries The Authority sites have been winning that's flat out it that's basically the end right then brand intent is up again so we see it across the board with a load of different specific types of sites queries and all sorts of stuff but in general what we can tell is that Google

has is now relying more so on brand signals and when you start looking at specific queries for example best WordPress hosting does it really make sense that WordPress should be number one when people are looking for best WordPress hosting yes it does from the in s that WordPress don't necessarily have skin in the game with their own specific hosting company and yes they are the original creator of the platform but do they truly have an unbiased

unreal opinion or is it just the fact that Google has jacked up Brands intent signals so much so that it's now taking over queries that used to previously be dominated by pages that were specifically Target in this keyword and not pages that were on the brand that were sort of answering the query if you look at things like Dyson it's gotten even more insane right we start to see one two three of the top spots and

even number five now being taken over by dyson.com domain in and of itself and again is it fully a good idea to be having the brand controlling that messaging and controlling the reviews are people looking for brand reviews or are they looking for unbiased public or journalist level reviews right I would say actually this is not answering Google's user intent as much and it's kind of favoring again this corporatism and this brand favor and yes it

is probably good in some way and respect for us as seos because it means our clients are going to get less pissed off when they've got negative reviews or online reputation management problem but for user intent is it better I would probably say no however it's a very very good example and a good reflection of how brand intent has been jacked up by Google over the last couple of years then we have e-commerce intent so actually

last year Google was jacking up e-commerce intent quite significantly and then this year it seems that they started to in sorry at the end of last year um they started to reverse that so for the last couple of years e-commerce intent had continually gone up and then towards the end of last year so around the December core update time it ended up being the opposite so we saw a drop off and now we have seen that

kind of recover almost a reversal of the changes that they made in December a lot of e-commerce sites I'm seeing that saw a drop in December have basically seen a full recovery in the traffic and rankings and positions that they lost in that update and a lot of sites that didn't had got all the other issues that we're going to be talking about a little later on in this video again e-commerce intend dropped and then it

bounced up again some sites are for Recovery some sites didn't but a lot of sites have seen that recovery happening in real time ugc signals just got jacked up again we see it on basically every Forum on the planet it doesn't matter if it's a massive Forum it doesn't matter if it's a tiny for him you see in the first red arrow there in the left that September August hcu and then you just see the exact

same thing happen again it's almost as if all they did was whatever they did in September they just double down on and increase those signals significantly and you see it reflected across the board this is not a standout example you see it on even the smallest of forums where you are seeing these gigantic increases in traffic in some cases because these forums are so small they are literally going from a couple of hundred visitors a month

to tens of thousands of visitors a month from Google it must be pretty weird if you are owning a forum that you thought was previously dead and maybe almost abandoned and maybe you know had a post a month or something suddenly receiving thousands of visits a day from Google it's pretty bizarre you see it again across even the smallest smallest of forums this is probably a really tiny example that I tried to find as many small

examples of forums as possible but both of those jumps you see specifically correlated with the September and the March helpful content classifications again because they baited into the algorith I don't really want to say that it's the hcu it's now kind of the HCC because it's a h helpful content classifier and that's what's happening in September but it wasn't baked into the algorithm now it's just a full part of the algorithm it's going to be happening

routinely for every website in the world destroying small Publishers in our wake so what else was lost then we've seen ug up we've seen e-commerce go up we've seen Authority go up we've seen all these things go up but what went down what lost in these updates well the first thing was we saw further intent changes so we just saw Reddit for example shifting up and taking even more places it might have been the case that

Reddit was maybe and this is again in the organic results not in the discussions and forums feature within the organic results specifically we saw Reddit maybe go from position 7 89 jumping to position two for a bunch of keywords across the board again Google just doubling down on their love for Reddit what I've repeatedly said to everybody is that Google loves to double down when it does so and if you're following the updates they tend to

be Trend based and it's Google doing the same things repeatedly so don't expect Google to suddenly upend and turn course and I've said that repeatedly to people who seem to think that these new ALG updates are going to save their websites for some reason then we have link quality changes so there's no specific link types for example guest posts are sometimes getting affected Niche edits a lot of the time affected because Google's changing the way it's

looking at historical data and Page edits and things like that however in general link quality just means that a lot of the sites that were being Mass sold that were essentially guest Post Farms or link farms and things like that they've now been neutralized a lot of those sites have been hit a lot of those sites taken out some have seen manual penalties others have just seen huge arhythmic drops does that mean that link is now

toxic no most of the time they're neutralized that just means that they do nothing they don't pass a signal regardless of what site they're linking to however it doesn't mean that they're toxic so don't be scared that a lot of these sites that you maybe picked up you know four or five years ago could now be affecting your site it's very unlikely that they actually are we we also saw a drop in FAQ schema basically every

one of our single variable test that's using FAQ schema seem to drop quite considerably again I don't know if it's just because of the kind of simple fact that seos kill everything that is good and glorious but most of the time it does seem to be whenever Google is relying on a single factor or seemingly is relying on a factor that fa uh that the SOS tend to spam and ingest that that uh in Factor so

much so that Google tends to either just spit it out or not rely on it and anymore again I do think that it helps Google with its training its AI it's training its um you know learning it's training it data it's doing all this kind of stuff so it's it's good for Google but they are probably less reliant on it nowadays and they don't care if you're using it as much as they wanted you to use

it before when they needed that data initially then also we saw drops across hidden content so this is the kind of stuff where you're seeing accordion and tabs and things again all of our single variable testing and quite of the few Commerce websites that we still use this style on saw drops across the board so that one was quite correlated quite heavily so can we talk about Recovery Solutions are there any actual answers here to to

these problems well the first one is that there's no actual evidence of recoveries so unfortunately regardless of what you say around hcu there is no specific sight level recovery that being said there is some evidence around content pruning unfortunately that content pruning of evidence of hcu HCC recoveries is deleting 90 99% of their website which is still resulting in them losing 90 99% of their traffic because they don't have those pages any longer yes the HCC

might have been removed and some of your many pages are now back ranking that's a good thing if you weren't having any rankings and not making anybody beforehand but you had to delete the majority of your site the majority of your cont the majority of your investment in the first place to result in that and that's not really a you know a great recommendation especially if that website can be used in other platforms and other channels

however removing semantically disconnected low quality pages is always going to be a good answer and if you don't remove them bear in mind pruning doesn't necessarily mean you're straight out deleting things it can mean you are improving and adapting something as well then we have the moving domains so straight up I've seen a few recoveries of people just straight moving domains or using the 301 the double 301 redirect trick and that has actually seen four recoveries

it's just seemingly remove the classifier all in all Al together um and then finally adding e-commerce slight of a slight bit of a joke here to be honest because I'm not that much of a fan of this however I have literally been seeing that some affiliate websites have been adding t-shirt websites T-shirt stores sorry to their affiliate websites in an effort to have the cart system and Ecom kind of intent shifting in their favor and then

also I've seen a couple ads based blogs using carts as well is there any evidence that those sites have seen recovery no but they are out there and they are options for people to use if you want to do that and I'm all for giving people as many options as they want thanks for watching you can follow me on X my X is Charo where I post a lot more content almost every day if you want

to consult with me you can visit Charles training.com you can go you can use code CFT tt300 to get $300 off per 1hour call that is only for five people so just go to child training.com go to Consulting and use that code CFT yt30 to get $300 off a 1 hour Consulting call if you want to speak to me directly I hope you enjoyed this video thank you so much for coming unfortunately I won't be answering

any questions or comments in this one but you can always go and reply to them on my Twitter or X because I have to go catch a flight but I'll see you guys soon peace