Has traffic to your website dropped from last year? Here is what may have happened …
It’s been a busy year for the Google Algorithm team – they have rolled out some serious amendments to it.
March 2025 Core Update
- Announced: March 13, 2025 (US Pacific time)
- Rollout: Took about 2 weeks, completing by March 27, 2025
- Impact: Caused notable volatility across desktop and mobile—especially around March 14–16—and particularly affected sectors like health and finance
- Focus: Enhanced evaluation of content quality, cracking down on low-value “parasite SEO” and spam
Other algorithmic changes in early June
Even before the June core update, significant volatility began in early to mid‑June. Analysts attribute this to Google pushing updates to specific systems such as its reviews ranking mechanism. These smaller but potent changes can shift traffic abruptly, even without an announced “core update.”
Timeline recap:
Mar 13–27, 2025 – March 2025 Core Update
Major, 2-week rollout with wide fluctuations across industries
Early June 2025 – Unannounced changes
(likely reviews-system tweaks) causing early volatility pre-June
Jun 30–Jul 17, 2025 – June 2025 Core Update
Second broad update of the year, further affecting ranking patterns
Why your year-on-year traffic comparison likely shows a dip:
- Immediate drop after March core update – hit quality/weak pages
- Mid‑June tweaking of ranking systems – shaking up SERPs (see blog)
- June core effects compounding volatility – with some sites gaining but others losing more.
Combined, these three rounds of changes likely underpin the significant traffic drop you’re seeing in your current reports.
What you can do next ...
- Use Google Search Console to track performance – identify which queries and pages dipped after each event
- Audit content relevance, freshness, and depth, especially in light of March’s quality shifts
- Review site reviews and product pages: the June updates likely recalibrated those systems
- Keep monitoring. Changes often take weeks to stabilise, and recovery may come in future updates.
If you want any help with this, just get in touch and we will see if we can help get you back where you belong…