I’ve written many emails sharing winning sites in the past.

Today, I’m going to revisit all the winning sites I covered before the March Core update to see how they’re performing now.

Many of these past “winners” were absolutely decimated by the March Core update.

Let’s dive in!

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First, I’ll cover all the sites from this email I wrote on October 16th: Revealing sites that did well after the Helpful Content Update

The initial spike is from the September Helpful Content Update. The drop shortly after was the November Core Update. But, as you can see from the last spike, the March Core Update was very kind to the site, propelling it to new heights.

Life with Siamese Cats is one of the most intereting sites I’ve ever covered. I think it serves as a great example of the type of content Google wants to reward. You should check it out, and read my analysis of it.

Back when I first shared this site in October, I said I didn’t know why it was doing so well.

I shared some theories (which you can read in the original email), but it doesn’t surprise me in the least to see that this site didn’t survive.

That bounce in the middle of the chart happened right around the September HCU. But as you can see, Google decided it didn’t like the site after all in March.

And I’m not surprised. Here’s what I said about FishLab back in October:

This site is definitely your typical niche site that Google hates (but not in this case I guess?)

…

So what does this site have going for it?

I honestly don’t know.

And, turns out Google eventually caught on and didn’t see anything special about it either.

Not a huge drop, so it appears Google thinks this site is fine. Or perhaps all the other percentage calculator sites are worse? Anyway, here’s what I said in October:

I’m afriad this is another case of “I have no idea why this site was rewarded”.

It’s got 5-6 ads above the fold, constantly reloading and slowing the site WAY down.

The content is nothing special compared to the hundreds of other calculator sites.

Needless to say, I’m not surprised it was hit by the March Core Update. I am surprised it wasn’t hit worse.

This site was still a glowing ember in early March with 2,000 monthly visitors, but it’s now down to just 18 visitors/mo according to Ahrefs. Ouch.

I didn’t understand why this site was doing well in October. But it doesn’t surprise me to see how it’s doing now!

Here’s what I said in October:

It was unharmed by the HCU, which is weird because the site has:

…

How the site survives any Google update is a mystery to me.

Good to see Google finally got it right in this case!

My take in October was that tool sites like Twittervid fared very well through the HCU. Looking at the data now, tool sites tend to fare much better than the average content site, but plenty of them do get hit.

The next few sites were shared in this email from January: 50-day old site already at 120K visitors/mo from Google

These were my thoughts on the site back in January:

If the HCU rolled out now instead of September, I doubt this site would survive. But it was indexed by Google at the very end of the HCU rollout, so for whatever reason it appears the HCU rules don’t apply to it.

Well, looks like the rules caught up to it in March.

This was a 301 redirect from a site hit by the HCU. It worked great, as you can see…until the March Core update, which caused a traffic freefall.

Nothing about the site was changed from the original site hit by the HCU. So, it’s no surprise the 301 didn’t save it in the long-run.

Here’s what I said about the site in January, before the big decline from the March Core update:

This site has no business ranking so well, and yet, because it was started AFTER the HCU, it has the green light from Google.

I’ve seen the same thing over and over again when looking at new sites. As long as they were built after the HCU, their growth is up and to the right. Even without backlinks.

And there you have it!

Hope this email was enlightening. As you can see, just because Google likes a site right now, doesn’t mean it’ll last long-term.

The only site I shared above that absolutely deserves to rank well in my opinion (now and when I first covered it), is the one that benefited most from the March Core update - Life with Siamese Cats.

Thanks for reading!

Ian

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