Are March Core update winners still winning?

Let's take a look...

Author

Ian H
June 05, 2024

During the rollout of Google’s March Core update, I shared a bunch of sites that were seeing massive traffic growth.

It’s now been about a month and a half since the update concluded, so I thought it’d be a good time to revisit those winning sites to see how they’ve been holding up since I featured them last.

Just so you know, I’m working on a major update to Site Stats Database. Later this month, it’ll include 10,000s (maybe 100,000+?) more sites, many of which are non-English language (this has been highly requested).

But even better, I’ll also update the traffic numbers and show monthly traffic changes, so you can quickly sort the entire database to show the winning (and “losing”) sites each month. The data will be current as of June.

Site Stats Database is the only tool on the planet with this feature (as far as I know!) and will be more useful for niche research and competitive analysis than ever before.

Here are the March Core winners I’ve featured, and how they’re doing now.

  1. Stallanspice (originally wrote about it and the next 3 sites here)

Still way up since the beginning of the March Core update, though there’s been a dip in traffic in June.

  1. Bake With Zoha

Hmm… same as the previous site - up since March, but big dip in June…

  1. Math = Love

Same traffic as before the March Core update. Math = Love’s top keywords are very high volume and volatile which explains the huge rises and dips recently. The top pages keep bouncing around but remain in the top 5.

  1. Homesteading Family

Still winning! Not surprised, as this site has a very well-established brand and multiple content types.

  1. CJ Eats Recipes (wrote about it and the next two sites here)

Like the first two recipe sites shared above, this site has had a traffic dip beginning in June.

  1. Secretary of State

I’m actually a bit surprised by this one. I didn’t expect this site to continue doing well when I first found it and while it’s had a dip in traffic, it’s still holding up quite well!

  1. Get Strong Animals

Still going strong! This site is primarily an ecommerce store, but it gets most of it’s traffic from regular blog posts.

  1. Oh Sweet Basil (originally wrote about this and the next site here)

Another recipe site with a dip in June. Interesting pattern…

  1. Minimize My Mess

Some volatility in the last month, but it’s still winning compared to March.

  1. Birdzilla

Big dip at the start of May. I wrote about this here if you’re wondering what’s going on.

  1. Barbell Medicine

Still going very strong. Not surprised in the least. This site pretty much does everything right. I first wrote about it here.

  1. London Travel Planning

When I first wrote about this site, lots of people thought traffic would soon drop, as the site has a super low DR and targets lots of informational keywords.

But obviously, it’s still going strong. Perhaps because it doesn’t have ads?

  1. Fossbytes

This site only had a slight increase with the March Core update, but what makes it interesting is that traffic dropped with the September HCU. I wrote about it here.

Very few sites showed any sign of life after losing traffic during the HCU. Sadly, it looks like traffic is dipping as of late.

So, there you have it!

For the most part, it looks like the March Core winners and still doing relatively well. Not surprising, as there hasn’t been a major Google update to shift things around much recently.

Hope you found this englightening in some way.

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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