Google's March 2024 Core Update

Hello everybody, my name is Cody, and I'm an SEO manager here at Marcel Digital. Today I'm going to be talking to you about Google's March 2024 core algorithm update.

On Tuesday, March 5th, 2024, Google announced a significant update was coming to its search ranking algorithm, and what they introduced is new spam policies aimed at enhancing the quality of search results. This update was more complex than normal, and frankly, it's one of the biggest ones I've seen in the last 3 to 5 years. It's expected to take more than a couple of weeks, probably closer to a month, to roll out, and during that time, we can expect fluctuations in rankings across all of organic. Google advises that there's nothing special that people need to be doing during this time to adjust for the algorithm or to be doing differently because ultimately their intent remains the same: providing good, helpful, and valuable content to the end-user.

However, this update does call out three specific things that it's looking to target and penalize. One of those is expired domain abuse, the second being scaled content, and the third being site reputation abuse. What do all these things mean? Well, expired domain abuse has been a tactic long in place where people look to acquire expired domains and transfer that value onto a new or existing domain to boost its equity. Scaled content, the second, using AI or frankly any source, whether that's human AI or a combination of both, to get a lot of content in place at one time. They're looking to crack down on that because again, they acknowledge that when it's produced in volumes like that, it tends to be relatively low value. And the third being site reputation abuse, where third parties are publishing with little to no oversight by the host site and again looking to exploit and manipulate the search results of that host site's ranking signals. These policies are designed to address specific bad practices that have become increasingly popular to ensure that users receive high-quality valuable content in their search results.

The March 2024 update proves Google's commitment to improving search quality and fighting spam. Content creators and website owners should review their strategies to ensure compliance with Google's updated policies and remember, focusing on creating original valuable content and avoiding manipulated practices is more crucial now than ever. Why I say this is as significant as it is, why is it such a big deal? This is the first time in a long time that these algorithm updates are resulting in Google handing out manual actions. What that means is your site could be potentially completely de-indexed from Google search index, removed completely, can't be found via organic search.

At Marcel Digital, we care about doing things the right way, the white hat SEO way, committed to creating original valuable content for the end-user and doing so in such a way that is compliant with Google's guidelines. If you or your business are facing potential manual action or are potentially losing rankings because of this or past updates, contact us today, and the SEOs like myself at Marcel Digital are more than happy to help you along the way.