Understanding Google’s March 2024 Core Update: What You Need to Know

Are you a digital marketer confused with what Google March 2024 Core Update About is? If yes, then this blog is a must read for you. The search engine giant has always emphasized on improving user experience with relevant and helpful content. So, the new algorithms and policies update tackles low-quality and irrelevant/ duplicate content.

If you are still thinking that it’s just regular core updates, then let us clear that the March 2024 core update is no less than a storm. The search engine giant has updated its algorithm to minimize spam and offer better-quality search results to its users. This update aims to boost high-quality websites and bring more organic traffic to them to improve their online presence. Let’s dive deeper into the details in this blog below.

Important Aspects Of Google’s March 2024 Core Update

First, let us discuss what are the new updates in Google’s search algorithms and the purpose of their implementation.

Enhance Ranking System

This is one of the main purposes of rolling out the March 2024 core update. The new algorithm policies focus on ranking only the helpful and relevant information and eliminating duplicate or redundant content in search results. The new ranking system will analyze the website on the basis of its user experience and content relevancy. Google claims that this new update will reduce duplicate and low-quality content by nearly 40%. After all, prioritizing quality in search indexing is crucial.

Improved Spam Policies

Google March 2024 Core Update has also rolled out new spam policies to pull out unhelpful content in search results. It will closely monitor the lowest-quality content and take action in case of any manipulative behaviors, For example, obituary spam, and new owners repurposing expired websites as spam repositories.

Scaled Content Creation to Manipulate Rankings

This is best to start with a quick example. Have you ever come across a site that claims to answer some trending questions but eventually content fails to deliver that? If yes, then please learn this is what scaled content abuse is. Though Google has had a policy against “spammy automatically-generated content”. The new update suggests that whether the content is generated entirely using any automation tools or manually or using a combination of both, isn’t always clear. So, the March 2024 Core Update aims to strengthen this policy to enhance search ranking results.

Misusing a Site’s Strong Reputation 

This policy will come into effect on May 5. Google has given website owners two months to rectify their mistakes and make necessary changes to protect their website’s reputation. There are several reputed websites with great content but they may also host unoriginal and irrelevant third-party content to capitalize. For instance, a third party might publish appliance reviews on a website to gain ranking benefits from that site. Such unaccountable content can mislead website visitors who have some other expectations from the site’s content. Such activities will now be monitored and such low-quality content will be marked spam.

Misuse of Expired Domains

Expired domains are typically purchased and repurposed to rank duplicate and redundant content. This misguides the visitors and they believe that content is a part of the older site when actually that may not be the fact. Such content will now be spammed to provide more relevant information to the users.

Impact of March 2024 Core Update

Google’s March 2024 Core Update has impacted many websites significantly. In fact, more than 800 websites were entirely deindexed as a result of the Algorithm Penalty within the next two days after this update rolled out. Though that deindexing was not associated with Google’s March 2024 Core Update, the later deindexation of websites was the consequence of this new update in the algorithm.

Google has confirmed that it will take nearly 1 month to implement the update. So, don’t take any major steps considering the penalization. This is because your website might gain all traffic back within a month. So, don’t rush and wonder why my website is being penalized in spite of having all helpful and human-written content.

Let’s now dig into some major impacts of the March 2024 Core Update.

Major Fall in Website Traffic

This is the obvious consequence for the impacted sites. Some reports claim that among all the deindexed websites, 837 sites accounted for more than 20.7 million organic search visits each month before the algorithm penalization. This sudden de-indexation and loss of organic traffic has caused huge advertising revenue losses of around $446,552 to the affected websites.

Spamming AI-Generated and Low-Quality Content

Google March 2024 Core Update has clearly stated that it will target the website if the published content is found low-quality and AI-generated. Even if the content is human-written, it must be relevant to the users and not be meant to manipulate search engine rankings.

Reshaping the Search Engine Landscape

A lot of websites have changed their ways of operation for SEO purposes after rolling out of March 2024 Core Update. This shift in Google’s approach to maintaining the quality of search engine results reinforces that it is paying attention to AI-driven spam and abuse.

How Can You Recover Your Website From Google’s March 2024 Core Update

There are five main reasons behind the widespread deindexation of websites. Let’s take a look at them and the ways you can deal with them.

Backlinks

Google tracks bad backlinks with its Spam Brain system. There are some websites that are doing well with the content but their backlink strategy is aggressive. They have either purchased the links or created backlinks on the spammy website.

Solution: If your website was given such backlinks that Google has deindexed or whose traffic has crashed with this algorithm update, then you must disavow those links. Please note that you only need to disavow the links that have either got algorithm penalty or a manual penalty.

Before starting the process of Google penalty recovery, you first need to check your  website for a manual penalty by entering the site. colon and the website’s URL and then if the site doesn’t show up in search results then it’s the manual penalty. For algorithm penalty, enter the website’s URL and then check at Semrush or Ahrefs whether the traffic has sunk down suddenly in the last few days.

User Experience

Google’s March 2024 Core Update focuses on improving the user experience. Now whether the content is relevant or not is not just determined by its accuracy but the page in which it’s published also plays a crucial role in it. User experience depends on two factors majorly:

• Ads
• Website’s speed

If your website’s speed is impacted after this March 2024 Core Update and there are ads running on your page, then please check whether there are a lot of ads on the page. Too much of anything isn’t good after all.

Solution: Decrease the number of ads on the page to maximize user experience.

If your website takes much time to load then no matter how good the content is, your website performance will not be improved. So make sure to upgrade the hosting, reduce the plugin, and use CDN to improve its performance.

Expired Domain

A lot of SEOs and website owners purchase the old expired domain and use its link or authority. Some of them also publish irrelevant content on those websites to manipulate the search rankings and earn ad revenue. Google March 2024 Core Update has taken steps to stop this practice and will de-rank or de-index the websites if any such manipulations are found.

Solution: If Google has mistakenly de-rank your website, you can use the Wayback machine to see how the domain looked some years ago and the type of content it had. If you get the website’s history, you can create a new thread on Google Search Console Community and mention your problem. Your problems will be then escalated and the penalty will be removed.

Poor Niche

Suppose the topic you chose for your blog wasn’t appropriate and that is misleading the users, your website might have to face serious consequences.

Solution: Avoid posting irrelevant and too much content on repeated topics for SEO purposes. Try choosing topics that improve user experience.

Content

If you have used automatically translated, AI-generated, or plagiarized content on your website, then be aware of that practice.

Solution: Delete AI-generated content from your website, check for duplicate content and start publishing fresh and helpful content to rank higher in search results.

Key Takeaway

• Pay attention to the type of content you publish on your website
• Work on improving user experience in spite of misleading them to make revenues
• Avoid expired domain abuse
• Fix the mistakes to gain the website’s organic traffic back

Google’s March 2024 Core Update has impacted many websites particularly those with AI-generated content. You cannot rely on any AI tools entirely and human intervention is required to make anything relevant for users. However, website owners impacted by this update can take necessary steps to work on their mistakes and fix them to avoid de-indexation. We also suggest auditing existing content for relevancy and creating high-quality content for your target audiences. Lastly, keep up with the SEO best practices to improve your website’s ranking and overall performance.