Things had been quiet for a few months, but in March and April 2024, Google rolled out one of its biggest updates ever. The update was designed to reduce the amount of low-quality content appearing in search results by 40%. At the same time, Google implemented a spam update, and a massive number of websites were deindexed. Find out below what the consequences are, how content remains king, and what Google recommends you do if you’ve been affected.
No more helpful content updates
The—for lack of an official or better name—March 2024 Core Update was announced on March 5 in a blog post by Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Management at Google. “We’re improving Search so you see more useful information and fewer results that seem to be optimized for search engines,” she wrote. “Today, we’re announcing important changes we’re making to improve the quality of Search and the usefulness of your results.”
With this update, Google aims to improve quality ranking by displaying more of the most useful information and reducing the proportion of non-original content. One of the consequences is that there will no longer be separate “helpful content ” updates. Google considers them so important that they will now be included in the core updates.
March 2024 Spam Update
At the same time, a new and improved spam policy was introduced to keep low-quality content out of search results. Specifically, the following issues were addressed:
- the use of automation to create content on a large scale
- the abuse of website reputation in the form of parasitic SEO
- the misuse of expired domains to promote other content
Mass Deindexing
During the rollout, countless websites were deindexed. Those pages didn’t just drop in the search results—they were manually removed from them. This mainly affected websites that ignored Google’s recommendations and were filled with low-quality, automatically generated content intended primarily for search engines rather than for visitors.
There was criticism that these removals coincided with two updates. “Manual actions are not updates,” Google responded. “A new spam policy is not an algorithmic update. So these are not ‘updates’ that ‘overlap’ with the core and spam updates.”
Fluctuations in the SERP
Although Google itself drew a lot of attention to the new spam guidelines, it was the March 2024 Core Update that was the talk of the SEO community. The rollout of the spam update took 2 weeks, while that of the core update took as long as 1.5 months. That’s 2 weeks longer than Google itself had estimated.
During that period, there were significant changes in the SERP—the search results pages. We ourselves saw mostly increases, both for our own pages and those of our clients. This makes sense, because as an experienced SEO agency, we’ve long focused on strong technical foundations, helpful content, and high-quality authority—and Google appreciates that.
Content Is Still King
Google seems to be focusing so heavily on helpful content and to have so much confidence in its ranking systems that it hopes authority will become less important. In its own documentation, it no longer describes backlinks as “an important factor in determining relevance,” but rather as “a factor.”
This is in line with several statements made by Google employees. For example, Gary Illyes said in February 2023 that links are not among the top three ranking factors. During the rollout of the March 2024 Core Update, John Mueller stated that “there are more important things for websites these days” than links. Illyes added that Google “needs very few links to rank pages” and that the search engine has made links “less important” over the years.
The Impact of the March 2024 Core Update
The March 2024 Core Update was the most significant one since Penguin 12 years ago. From now on, helpful content is firmly embedded in the ranking factors. The goal was to reduce the proportion of low-value content in search results by 40%. Google even claims to have achieved a 45% reduction.
The search engine also had some good advice for those affected by the update. “There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update, as long as they’re already creating helpful content intended for people. For those who may not be performing as well, we recommend reading our help page on creating useful, reliable, people-first content.” That’s the same recommendation that was given during previous Google updates.
