March 2023 Core Update

The best way to benefit from core algorithm updates and guard against potential losses in the future is to:

• Follow Google’s best practices for search ranking
• Refer to Google’s search quality rater guidelines
• ‍Understand the signals Google’s search engine uses to understand content

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1. Organic traffic trends, especially non-branded (Google Search Console)
2. Ranking flux & search visibility for high intent keywords (Semrush, Ahrefs, or similar)—look for ranking movements (higher or lower) for website content
3. Keep a close eye on your most valuable SERPs—look out for any changes in the content that is being ranked higher or lower than before the update
4. URL indexation trends (Google Search Console)

‍

1. Check if the speed or E-E-A-T of your URLs could be a cause of traffic drops.
2. Ensure that you have not deleted any pieces of content which were previously earning a high volume of organic search traffic.
3. Ensure that content that used to get traffic is still indexed.
4. Determine if significant changes have been made to your website structure or semantic HTML.‍
5. Prune your content to remove unhelpful or non-unique page.
6. Monitor and track changes made to your website.
7. Track the changing relevance (perceived intent) of keywords related to your content.

Sometimes there's nothing you can do about traffic losses after a Core Update.