Google’s March 2024 Update: What You Need to Know

Google’s latest core update, as ever, has been introduced to improve the quality of Search by showing less ‘clickbait’, and more content that people will find useful in their searches. There are also new spam policies that will improve the management of practices that can negatively impact the quality of Google’s search results. In this article, we’ll explore the main highlights of Google’s March 2024 update and help you understand how to improve your search performance as a result.

Improved quality ranking

One of the main focuses of Google’s March 2024 update is to enhance Google’s ranking systems. The refined ranking systems will be able to better understand if pages aren’t helpful, could have a better UX and if they seem to be built primarily for search engines rather than humans.

Spam policies

Aside from the adjustments to the ranking algorithms, Google is working hard to remove low-quality content from search results. Take a look at what they’re targeting below…

Expired domain abuse

Expired domain abuse is where expired domains are purchased and repurposed to boost the search ranking of typically low-quality content. This practice misleads users into thinking the new content is a part of the old trusted website. 

Scaled content abuse

Updating its’ policy against automation being used to generate low-quality and unoriginal content at scale to boost search ranking, Google is making it clear that there’s no more space for spam in their search engine.

This updated policy focuses on the abusive behaviour of producing content at scale to boost search ranking, irrespective of whether automation, humans or a combination of both are involved.

How is this different?

Google’s long-standing spam policy has regarded the use of automation, including generative AI, is classified as spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. 

Google’s March 2024 update is in line with their previous policy and based on the same principles. This update has expanded the long-standing policy to account for more sophisticated, scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low-quality content was created purely through automation.

The new policy has been established to help people focus more clearly on the fact that product content at scale is abusive if done to manipulate search rankings, and this applies whether automation, humans or a combination of both are involved.