Google has finally announced the completion of the March 2024 Core update, which took a total of 45 days to roll-out! A lot of sites have been affected by this update, are you one of those that were hit? Check out Google’s core update feedback form and the debugging drops in traffic documentation. More of these in this week’s news roundup.
Google has confirmed the completion of the March 2024 Core Update last April 27. They announced that the roll-out was completed as of April 19, 2024, however, they only announced it a week after it. They have also provided a feedback form for those who would like to provide their feedback on this update. The form is only available until May 31, 2024.
According to Google, the feedback form may help them find ways to improve their search rankings generally, through future updates. It is not used to make changes to a specific query, specific listings, or for specific sites. It is only used to consider general improvements that may work across Search generally in the future. The teams at Google will not respond to the submissions. Submissions will be retained up to 12 months.
Check out the feedback form here.
The March 2024 Core Update is said to be Google’s biggest core update. It involved changes to multiple core systems and it marks Google’s evolution in how they identify the helpfulness of content. The core ranking systems have been enhanced to show more helpful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches and it no longer uses one signal or system to be able to do this.
It was expected that the update will reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in the search results by 40%. It was forecasted that it would take a month to complete roll out but it ended up taking a total of 45 days.
The March 2024 Core Update has now finished rolling out and a lot of sites reported that they have experienced huge drops in ranking and traffic to their pages/site. With the completion of the roll-out, Google has also updated their documentation on debugging drops in Google Search traffic help page to help those who have experienced drops in their site traffic.
If you have experienced drops in traffic from the core update, this is a good resource to go through. Check it out here.
One of the three new spam policies that Google has introduced in March is the policy on Reputation Abuse. While the 2 other policies – Scaled Content Abuse and Expired Domain Abuse – had immediately taken effect, the policy on Reputation Abuse is set to take effect this May 5th. Time was allotted for site owners to prepare for the change and make the necessary changes to their site before it takes effect.
What Is the Reputation Abuse Spam Policy?
Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals. This includes sponsored, advertising partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of the host site’s main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provides little to no value to users. An example provided is when a third-party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefit from the site. This type of content ranking on search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have a vastly different expectation for the content on the website.
The new policy doesn’t consider all third-party content to be a violation, only those that are hosted without close oversight and which is intended to manipulate search rankings. As an example, many publications host advertising content that is intended for regular readers, rather than to manipulate search rankings – called native advertising or advertorial content. This type of content typically would not confuse regular readers of the publication when they find it on the publisher’s site directly or when arriving at it from Google’s search results. This type of content do not need to be blocked from search.
Google’s spam policies page lists some illustrative examples of what is and isn’t site reputation abuse. These type of content needs to be blocked from Google Search to avoid violating their spam policies.
A lot of sites have been affected by this recent core update and it was Google’s advice to wait out the completion of the update before making changes to their site. Now that it is completed, it is time to assess the damage, make the necessary changes, and wait for recovery.
Not sure where to get started? Check out our article on What to Do During A Google Search Algorithm Update. It was a previously published article prior to the March 2024 Core Update but the information still stands and were provided by the search team. Read about it here.
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