Google recently announced its March 2024 Core Update aimed to reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by 40% on search result pages and will be rolled out over the upcoming weeks.
Table of Contents:
- What are Google Core Updates?
- March 2024 Core Update
- Expired Domain Abuse
- Parasite SEO Crackdown
- Scaled Content Abuse
- SEO Influencers being manually deindexed from search results
- Google continuing to veer away from independent voices
March 2024 Core Update
In the wake of technologies like AI-generated content and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), practitioners continually seek ways to wield higher rankings on Google Search Result Pages.
Google’s March 2024 Core Update is believed by many to be in response to growing concerns that “Google Search Results are getting worse”. What’s more is a growing abundance of Artificial Intelligence tools generating “trash” content, and SEO content abuse inundating the Internet with thousands of articles, ultimately reducing user experience.
“Everyday, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer”, said Elizabeth Tucker, Google’s Project Management Director, in a Blog Post published by Google. “We’ve long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and we work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality content”.
“Additional content, AI content that is literally flooding the internet is taking more of Google’s resources to find, crawl, index, analyse, rank, and interpret it”, Micheal Costin and Arthur Fabik said on a recent episode of the ‘The SEO Show’ Podcast. “Spam affiliate sites, automated trash. If we’re interested in a product, we [now] don’t go to Google. We go to YouTube and watch videos about it, and maybe go to Reddit before we go to Google to search for it because we know of all the affiliate sites out there.”
5 Things To Know About The Google March 2024 Core Update
1. Expired Domain Abuse
In the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), this form of spam involves using an expired domain that previously hosted links and rebuilding it to create low-quality pages that then backlink to other websites to create revenue from it. With this core update, Google now identifies this as spam content, causing it to either lose ranking or be manually removed altogether by Google.
Though it is speculated that there are multiple factors that Google could potentially determine those using previously owned domains, some also believe that this is a possible Google PR (Public Relations) stunt. This would be to scare “Black Hat SEO” practitioners notorious for employing practices that violate search engine guidelines and manipulative search engine results pages (SERPS).
2. Parasite SEO Crackdown
Targeting “Site reputation abuse” (or industry known as Parasite SEO), this practice leverages a high-authority website’s reputation by third-party websites to create unoriginal material to rank higher on search results with limited content value to users. Google says that before imposing this update, there will be a two-month period before May 5, 2024, to allow site owners to make any necessary adjustments to their website where needed.
3. Scaled Content Abuse
This addresses Artificial Intelligence and Programmatic SEO websites that publish content at mass with limited worth to the user. AI tools continue to drive growth for generating content with 3 in 4 marketers using AI to facilitate market trends and customer behaviour.
A factor that Google’s algorithm often considers when generating search results pages is the frequency of when content is added to a website. Google sees this as a means to trust that a website delivers new and updated content. Many saw this as a way to manipulate Google search results by publishing hundreds to thousands of low-quality AI-generated content to increase their authority. As a result, these websites would get a ton of followers and engagement, which would ultimately be used to either sell courses or software.
By strengthening its policy, Google seeks to “take more action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale”.
4. SEO Influencers being manually deindexed from search results
There have been reports of multiple SEO Influencers having their website deindexed from Google for employing spam tactics to game Google’s algorithms. Sites like Glarity believe it is a tactic by Google to “create fear in the SEO community before Google fully implements” its March 2024 Core Update.
Seo Consultant, Gleen Gabe wrote in a March 7 tweet, relating to Google deindexing websites:
Although we're waiting for the March 2024 core update to land (soon), it looks like Google has not waited on the manual action front based on the spam policy updates it announced yesterday. I've already had multiple people ping me about sites being completely deindexed. And those… pic.twitter.com/VBZMaSwSww
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 6, 2024
SEO Influencers like Jacky Chou received a manual action on his Google Search Console with his site containing black hat “aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, [and] egregious violations of Google spam Policies”.
5. Google continuing to veer away from independent voices
Something to consider with Google’s Core Update is the future of independent content and voices. This is despite Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Search Liasion, stating that “Google has driven more traffic to websites each year since its inception”.
Public consensus has suggested that Google’s updates lean more towards relying on content from bigger authoritative players. Additionally, sites like the Search Engine Journal believe Google is trying to train their AI for Google Seach Generative Experience (SGC) to “Serve a wide range of information… from multiple perspectives”.
It could be of future concern that Google could be crushing small publishers and businesses after securing a $60 million AI training content deal with Reddit in late February 2024. This comes after Reddit had recently dominated Google Search Results with its ‘Discussions and Forms’ feature, alongside competitor site Quora. Moreover, this led to a combined 3x the presence of every other site combined.
Final Thoughts On This Core Update
Google’s March 2024 Core Update, though some refer to it as the ‘SEO Armageddon to go get niche website publishers’, others view it as an attempt by Google to rebuild its reputation. This is partly due to the influx of published spam and low-quality content, ultimately affecting user experience.
In this core update, Google targets expired domain abuse, parasite SEO and scaled content manipulation. It still leaves in question whether Google will, in fact, reach their 40% target on reduced spam content. Thus would Google’s target be even enough to combat this ongoing AI-generated content trend?
If you are a small business or publisher using White-Hat SEO practises within Google Search Engine’s terms of service, this should not have a significant immediate impact for now. However, in the long term, it will be interesting to see Google’s approach moving forward and how these updates impact smaller voices in the future.
What do you believe is the future for spam and low-quality content on Google Search Result Pages? Will this update fix that?