On March 5, 2024, Google announced its broad core update for 2024. It is safe to say that this update is aggressive and has shocked the entire SEO community. The main idea behind this March 2024 update is that Google plans to remove 40% of unhelpful content from the internet. Why this update? Simply put, Google is the go-to search engine for everyone, whether they are looking for information, products, or services. However, many SEO experts are using content not to help users get the information they need but simply to rank their site and get traffic. Due to this unhelpful and AI-generated content flooding the market, the quality of the content is declining, and spam is increasing. Thus, this new update from Google is its way to combat low-quality content and ensure only deserving sites rank in the search engine results.
In this blog, we will discuss the Google Search March 2024 update in simple words, which will be helpful for all SEOs and website owners.
Google Search March 2024 Update
On March 5, 2024, Google rolled out a new update, which is a bundle of three updates. This includes:
- Broad Core Update: The first core update of 2024.
- Helpful Content Update: The last one in the series of helpful content updates.
- Spam Update 2024: An aggressive update to reduce and control website spamming in 2024.
Let’s discuss all three in detail below.
Broad Core Update
Google comes up with two broad core updates per year. On March 5th, the first broad core update for 2024 was announced. It will take a complete month for this update to completely roll out. Here is the purpose of this update:
- The main goal of this update is to improve the ranking of helpful content while lowering the ranking and traffic for websites with unhelpful content.
- It means that if a website publishes bulk content, whether human or AI-generated, just for SEO purposes—to get a higher ranking or traffic—without thinking whether it is valuable for the users or not, the rank of the site will go down.
- This core update means 40% of content from Google will be removed. Only content that is educational or informative will remain on Google.
Solution: Focus on natural content; do not focus on word count or keywords. Instead, worry about writing content that helps a user in some way.
Helpful Content Update
It is the last update in the helpful content update and has now become part of the core update of Google. The goal of this update is to ensure websites with valuable content rank highly on Google. But if your site has only content for gaining traffic, Google will remove it from search engine results.
- It is an aggressive update with severe implications for the overall health and performance of the website.
- After this update, if a website has 1000 pages and 900 of them have repetitive, duplicate, or unhelpful content, Google will not only reduce the ranking of these pages.
- But it will also rank down the pages with informative or helpful content. In short, there is a site-wide signal; even one bad page can decrease the ranking of the entire website.
Scam Update
Scam Update is a three-course update to control spamming on websites. It includes three types of abuse: scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse. Let’s discuss it in detail.
Scaled Content Abuse
It is tragic for those websites that publish bulky, low-quality, and unhelpful content to simply gain traffic or get their ranking up. If any SEO expert follows this tactic, Google’s scam update will push their ranking down immediately. Even if you remove such pages and start writing helpful content, Google will not rank your website normally. In short, a website with such content has no future!
Site reputation abuse
Many websites have high authority in their niche. But to rank in SERPs, they publish articles unrelated to their niche. It is known as parasite SEO. They do this to increase their brand authority. Unfortunately, the site reputation abuse update means such sites will see their ranking go down. Furthermore, SEO experts have 2 months until May 5th to remove unrelated content and ensure their website ranking is safe.
An example of this is when a site authoritative in SEO starts writing about celebrity trends to gain traffic; if they do so, this update will immediately reduce their ranking.
Expired Domain Abuse
If you use any expired domain to gain backlinks from that domain, your site will be penalized. Misusing expired domains to get a ranking for low-quality content is a big no. That does not mean you cannot use an expired domain to write new content; that is fine. But if you use it to gain backlinks, you will immediately find your site or page removed from Google.
Also Read: Google Algorithm Updates and Changes History
Key Takeaways
As an SEO Webmaster, you should keep in mind the following takeaways related to the Google search March 2024 update:.
- The broad core update for 2024 focuses on removing any webpages with bulky, unhelpful content. If the purpose behind the content is only to gain traffic and not inform users about products or services, Google will reduce the ranking or remove the content. Almost 40% of content will be removed from Google after this update.
- The second update—helpful content updated—will have severe consequences for the entire website. Even if one page of the site has invaluable content or stuffed keywords for the sake of traffic, the entire site will see its ranking go down.
- The scam update has three parts focused on reducing website scamming. The first part focuses on removing sites with low-quality and bulky content. The second part, site reputation abuse, will monitor high-domain site publishing content unrelated to their niche for building brand authority. While the third update focuses on removing any website using expired domains for building backlinks.
Conclusion
Google’s March 2024 broad core update shows how committed the company is to maintaining its credibility as a search engine. The updates keep rolling out to ensure Google remains a space for sharing helpful information with billions of people globally. A note to SEO experts: do not take shortcuts or use black-hat tricks to rank your website. Ensure you focus on providing helpful content to your users instead of worrying about adding keywords or bulk content to the site to get a high ranking. If you do that, your website will be safe and will keep growing.
