March 2024 Google Core Update
Several times a year, Google makes significant, broad changes to its search algorithms and systems to present helpful and reliable results for searchers.
The March 2024 core update is a more complex update than other usual core updates, involving changes to multiple core systems. It also marks an evolution in how to deliver helpful and reliable content for searchers.
As this is a complex update, the rollout took up to a month.
Has Your Site Been Negatively Affected?
Since March 2024, have you noticed a drop traffic?
It could be due to the latest algorithm update.
However, It’s crucial to differentiate between organic search, referral, and direct traffic. A decline in organic search traffic suggests your site’s visibility in SERPs might be waning. Conversely, changes in referral or direct traffic might indicate other factors at play that are unrelated to an update.
If the decline in website traffic is a result of changes to the search algorithm, it may be necessary to make adjustments to your content and optimization strategy to be in line with the new algorithm. This could involve modifying the content, keywords, and overall SEO approach. Adapting to the updated algorithm can help the website regain visibility and once again attract traffic.
Now, let's take a closer look at what this update primarily focuses on.
March 2024 Google Core Update
These are the key changes Google has announced to improve the quality of Search and the helpfulness of users’ results:
Improved quality ranking: Algorithmic enhancements to core ranking systems to ensure the most helpful information on the web and reduce unoriginal content in search results.
Improved spam policies: Updated spam policies to keep the lowest-quality content out of Search.
Improved quality ranking
With the March 2024 core update, Google aims to showcase content that is valuable, trustworthy, and designed with users in mind:
“There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people. For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page.” read more
As not all content meets the quality standards that Google seeks. The March 2024 core update is Google’s move to address this challenge. It hopes that users will once again find valuable and trustworthy content.
With this update, Google aims to reduce spammy content:
“As of April 19, we’ve completed the rollout of these changes. You’ll now see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results versus the 40% improvement we expected across this work.”
Improved spam(low-quality content) policies
Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn't always as clear.
Google has long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings. This updated spam policies were originally designed to address instances of content being generated at scale where it was clear that automation was involved.
This update will allow Google to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content:
“Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it’s created.” read more
Recovering from the Google’s March 2024 core update
The following is Google’s mission, which can be found on Google's homepage:
"Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Google's mission is to make it easy for everyone to access high-quality information, so the Google search engine aims to provide results that best match the user's search intent.
If the traffic loss results from rankings drop for queries you used to rank well for, that is probably an issue with your content. Start by looking at the content ranking for those terms now. Look for clues as to why that content might be preferable over yours, and adjust your content accordingly. Try to make your content more relevant to the user.
Enhancing content quality(How to Content SEO)
Let me tell you how you can adjust your content which meets with Google’s guidelines:
Relevancy
Google search engine exists to provide answers to users' queries, starting from the queries they type in out of curiosity. Google employs various keyword-based search algorithms to understand the meaning of the input query and ascertain the search intent:
After understanding the meaning and context of the query, Google Search attempts content analysis to find content highly relevant to the query. It evaluates whether the page content contains the same keywords as the query and determines the relevance between the query and the content:
After identifying the relevance of the content, Google Search measures and evaluates the quality of information. Google conducts page quality evaluation (PQ rating) through its own content quality assessment factors, maintaining a balance between relevance to the query and providing users with information:
So, what specifically constitutes high-quality content with relevance to keywords? What type of content does Google favor?
E-E-A-T
Google evaluates content based on its utility, reliability, and user focus. It employs a specific evaluation metric called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), highlighted 137 times in its 175-page Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
Reading the guidelines may help you self-assess how your content is doing from an E-E-A-T perspective, improvements to consider, and help align it conceptually with the different signals that our automated systems use to rank content.