Google March 2024 Core Update and Web Spam Policy Explained

Google released its first core update and new web spam policy for this year on 2024.03.05 at the same time, and we’ll learn more about the content of the update and its impact on websites.

Google Core Update:

The core update is a necessary measure that Google does regularly every year to improve search quality and user experience. There are a few things to note about this Google update:

• This update is more complex and makes improvements to the core ranking system, so it will have a greater impact on websites than the regular core update, and will probably take about a month to complete in its entirety, as opposed to the usual two weeks or so that the core update takes to complete.
• Once again, the importance of creating useful, reliable, human-centered content for websites is emphasized.

From the “Questions and Answers Page” of this core update, we learned the following:

• Clarified the existence of Google’s Useful Content System (used to identify useful content) and its impact on Google’s search rankings (Google’s core ranking system).
• It is pointed out that Google’s rating of the usefulness of the content of a website is based on the page level, but it also refers to the website level signals; for example, if a website has too much spam content, it may affect the effectiveness of other content pages in the search results.
• Removing useless (spam) content from a website can help improve the ranking effect of other pages in search results, but it takes some time.

Google Spam Policy Update:

This update mainly introduces three new policies:

• Abuse of expired domain names: refers to the use of expired domain names in the weight gained before (Google official inside is no weight this kind of expression, here is to facilitate the understanding), to create some low-quality content, in an attempt to get good rankings.
• Misuse of article content: generating a large amount of non-original, low-quality content for ranking purposes, regardless of whether the content is created manually, automatically, or a combination of manually and automatically.
• Misuse of website weight: This refers to the use of a website’s weight to publish irrelevant, low-quality third-party content to gain good rankings. Some common examples are posting irrelevant content on B2B websites and using the weight of the B2B website to get ranked in search results, which will be considered a violation of the law – this new policy will come into effect on May 5, 2024.

These are just a few thoughts on this Google update, the key points being: focus on website content, focus on the quality of the entire website, remove useless content, pay attention to expired domains, and use third-party platforms. Keeping up to date with Google’s core updates will help us to target our website for SEO optimization.

Postscript I.

As of 2024-04-19 10:00 (PST), this 45-day Google Core Update is all but over, and it’s the most time-consuming core update since 2020.

From my side of a few sites, the traffic change is not big, and individual sites have a small increase, the next estimate will be stabilized for some time.

↑Changes in Website Traffic Compared to the Same Period Last Year

Postscript II.

In June, Google once again released a core update on website spam, the frequency of which is rare in recent years, but also shows that Google attaches great importance to the content of the website, which is also why pure AI-generated content sites are the main reason for the Google penalty.

Google’s every core update (including these two) is a winners and loser process, but also the quality of the past site is another comprehensive test, it will not tell us what should be modified, but will provide us with a clear direction: to create user-centered, reliable, useful content, and do not try to take some of the “tricky” ways, it may be a good idea. At the same time, do not try to take some “speculative” approach, may be a short-term enhancement of the site (now the chances of this has been very, very small), but on the site later very big impact.