The Google Broad Core March 2023 update completed its rollout last week.

The update rollout lasted 13 days, beginning on March 15 at 10:30 am ET and concluding on March 28 at 10:30 am ET.

Please be aware that the website indicates this update began 7 hours later than it actually did. Actually, the update began at 10:30 a.m. ET.

It displays the later date because that is when Google added rankings to the status dashboard and entered the data. Here is what this status page displays, but again, the timestamp for March 15 is slightly off:

We observed significant volatility with this March 2023 core update on March 16 and again on March 23/24. This was, in my opinion, a significant update that landed quickly and struck hard.

There has been some volatility and chatter over the past 24 hours, but not as much as at the start of the update or later last week.

March 2023 Google Core Update

Here is a condensed list of the most important things we know right now:

  • Name: March 2023 Google Broad Core Update
  • Date: 15 March 2023, approximately 10:30 AM ET
  • Completed: March 28, 2023, at approximately 10:30 a.m. ET
  • Targets: It examines all forms of content.
  • Type: It is not a penalty; it promotes or rewards excellent websites.  This is a global update that affects all regions and languages.
  • Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were affected by this update, but so far it appears to be a typical core update with a wide reach and a rapid impact.
  • Discover: Core updates affect Google Discover and other features, as well as feature snippets and more.
  • Recover: If you were affected by this update, you will need to examine your content to determine if you can improve it by following Google’s core update recommendations.
  • Refreshes: Google will perform periodic updates to this algorithm, but these updates may not be communicated in the future. Perhaps this is what we’ve witnessed over the past few weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

Prior Broad Core Updates

This March 2023 core update took 13 days to roll out.

The last update was the September 2022 core update, which was on September 12, 2022, just over six months ago. Then, on May 25, 2022, the May 2022 core update.

Before that, the November 2021 core update took place from November 17 to November 30.

Before the November update, the last time the core was changed was in July 2021, and the month before that, in June.

The last one was on December 3, 2020, six months before the June update. It was called the December 2020 core update.

Before that, there was a 7-month gap until the May 2020 core update on May 4, 2020.

The one before that, the January 2020 core update, was on January 13, 2020, and the one before that, the September 2019 core update, was on September 24, 2019.