March core update 2025 dropped on March 13th, and it was the first core update this year that made it through the search ecosystem. It finished in 2 weeks, much like the timeline for most broad core updates. The broader objective? To refine Google’s ranking capabilities by surfacing more helpful and relevant content.
The shifts extended across all regions and languages, unlocking a few surprises and other suspected shifts. Overall, it was a critical for impacted sites, but not as widespread as expected.
So today, we’re reviewing the first core update of 2025 and answering the following questions.
- What was the impact like on rankings & traffic?
- Which niche sites were impacted the most?
- Is Forbes making a comeback?
Overall Volatility Chart
The overall volatility chart of the March core update was towards the high range. Since the rollout point, the volatility touched peaks and also experienced fluctuations, which can be described as the conventional core update behavior.
The Impact of March Core Update 2025
The March core update impact extended across many small sites and major industry players. Some complained of lost traffic, while others saw a consistent growth pattern across their performance charts. Let’s review all angles to break down its impact.
Discover Traffic Loss
Many site owners reported a considerable loss in the amount of Discover Traffic. It was strange to see this pattern, as this is something we haven’t seen happening to most sites in the previous updates.
Glenn Gabe took to Twitter to address this, noting that the fluctuations followed typical core update patterns. Some sites experienced traffic loss around the same time the update was rolling out.
Ranking Improvements & Declines
While some sites including Reddit, Yelp, and Thesaurus.com saw notable improvements in their visibility, others tumbled down the slope rapidly. Even big players like Amazon experienced partial ranking losses, but only on pages with thin content or those that were affiliate-like.
On Reddit, we saw people mentioning traffic and ranking loss.
In fact, some sites were even reported to have been deindexed.
In essence, the swings went both forward and backward, pushing some down while hauling others up. The preference leaned towards higher-quality content pages characterized by evergreen content and detailed topic coverage.
Comeback of Parasite SEO Sites
But there’s also one thing to note here, before this update rollout, there was a lot of chatter around pre-update volatility. In mid-February and the first week of March, many SEOs noticed a ton of movement and associated it with the minor algorithm updates. Here is an analysis by Gagan Ghotra.
And according to our theory, it can have a strong correlation with Forbes Advisor making a surprising comeback around the same time as the pre-update volatility.
We first heard about Forbes popping back on Search on Feb 27th, and ran some tests to witness it ourselves. Evidently, it has returned to SERPs in all its glory, ranking again for popular queries like CBD gummies with 2025 right in the title.
For those of you who don’t know, Forbes Advisor was wiped from the search engine for violating a site reputation abuse policy back in November. In that update, the policy expanded to all types of third-party content that leveraged the host site’s signals, regardless of first-party involvement or oversight of the content.
To know more about the background and analysis, check out our video on the November Core Update.
And the comeback tour doesn’t end here, we saw other similar brands recovering their traffic and rankings, too, like Wall Street Journal Buyside, Men’s Journal Health, and US News 360.
Comeback of Affiliate Sites
In this chaos, many affiliate sites also got to have a field day. In many instances, Webmasters attributed the upturn in affiliate site visibility and sales to the core update behavior. A number of affiliate marketers reported surprising growth next to rising ranking positions.
To put it into context, the fallout was prevalent in websites featuring thin content pages, unhelpful reviews, or programmatically or AI generated content. On the other hand, affiliate sites conforming with E-E-AT standards weren’t seen going down the same rathole. In the end, the update favored value over quantity.
Home Services Niche Impact
While studying the impact of this update, we found this interesting study by Local SEO Guide. They analyzed a large amount of keyword data focused on the home services niche to understand how the sites were impacted. The study says,
“The week of March 10th, 2025, had the most volatile SERPs we have seen in over a year that we have been tracking 100K Home Services keywords in SERP Summary.”
This helped us gauge what the impact of core updates on the home services niche was like. Digging into the SERP Summary data, these were the top 10 winners and losers:
Takeaway
So, that sums it up, the chaos wasn’t unlike any other broad core update. It brought about inconsistent patterns throughout traffic and ranking charts, but one thing is clear — the rollout targeted poor quality content and inconsistent search intent, while structural precision and authoritative, relevant, and user-centric pages were rewarded.
Hope this March core update 2025 wasn’t some life-altering experience for you guys. Stay tuned to continue getting updates on other upcoming core or algorithm updates.
