traffic drop from march 7th

vicvideopic

Manu123
I am in the exact same situation: My site went down to zero on March 7, recovered for a couple of days, and then down to zero again, where it still is now after 10 days. Views from google are dead!
At the same time, my Core Vitals suddenly deteriorated, notably Interaction to Net Paint for mobile.
I do not use AI and my site is organized in clusters for topical authority.
I Would be very interested to have some input about it

Ethan

vicvideopic I moved your query to a new thread to avoid confusion. So your site has been hit by the Google algorithm update, which began rolling out on March 5th this year. We've made a couple of Community posts to address what the algorithm update consists of and how you can respond to it:

https://community.ezoic.com/d/36942-google-spam-update-2024-what-it-means-and-how-to-protect-your-sites-ranking
https://community.ezoic.com/d/37464-how-to-improve-content-after-the-google-spam-update-march-2024

A drop in Core Web Vitals is not going to cause traffic to drop by that much. Whilst speed is a ranking factor, its only one of hundreds of Google's ranking factors, and Google tends to prioritise ranking sites on content rather than speed.

Google's update doesn't just look at combatting AI content, its targeted against all content Google deems less valuable to users.

You mentioned that the site dropped down to zero - is that in Console? Typically the update would cause impressions to fall, but not to drop to 0 entirely. If impressions are 0 you may have some manual actions to complete in Console to re-index the site, is that the case for you?

vicvideopic

Ethan
Thank you Ethan,
I am not overly concerned with the drop in Core Web Vitals, although it would be nice to fix it.
A much more serious issue is the drop in views. My site has been demolished in terms of traffic from google.
On search console, daily view fell to daily single digits from around 150. Daily impression to a couple of hundreds from around four thousands.
My site is 16 months old with 125 posts, all of them manually edited by myself. I have a five years old YouTube channel about the same topic, so in my blog there are plenty of original videos and photos and plenty of personal tests and opinions. I have been adding an average of 6 posts per month in the past five months.
I am a member of Income School, so I have used their method since the beginning: content organized in clusters for topical authority, no AI, not going for external links, adding first-hand experience to each post, and so on.
Like many other bloggers, I have the feeling that google has decided to destroy niche websites, so I should ignore it and simply focus on other sources of traffic, like emails, social media, Bing, and so on

Ethan

vicvideopic We can definitely revisit site speed at a later date! I just wanted to clarify that the algorithm update should be the priority here 🙂 Just looking at Core Web Vitals, the site is actually passing all but INP on mobile!

It is frustrating to see Google hit a site in rankings so much when the content is all handwritten. You are also correct, it could be pretty handy to focus on other sources of traffic e.g. social and emails - I think that'll really help.

I can see in your landing pages you've been editing content the last few days. Hopefully Google recognises that and the site ranking will recover over the coming weeks. I would advise you keep doing this for now, as updated content in general helps with SEO and you're at the advantage that you know about your topic (unlike a few AI generated sites), so you can improve content quality where necessary/applicable. Maybe check out our SEO tools too which could be handy: https://pubdash.ezoic.com/nicheiq