- Kaleb Nation
Lead Project Manager
What you'll learn?
Discover how Google's March 2024 core update improves search quality by targeting low-quality content, manipulative tactics, and spam to enhance user experience.
Read time:
- 5 Minutes
Google has just unleashed a tidal wave of search quality enhancements aimed at scrubbing the web clean of unhelpful, low-quality content. The update—called the March 2024 core update—is a multi-pronged effort representing Google search’s most aggressive and comprehensive attack to date on attempts to manipulate search rankings, spam and poor digital experiences.
Key Takeaways
- Google has released major enhancements aimed at improving the quality of search results, targeting unhelpful and low-quality content.
- The update, known as the March 2024 core update, represents a comprehensive effort to enhance the integrity of search results.
- This update is Google’s most aggressive move to date against search ranking manipulation, spam, and poor digital experiences.
google core update march 2024: Elevating Search Quality
At the center of this search quality tsunami is the new March 2024 core update, which aims to collectively reduce low quality content by enhancing multiple core ranking systems simultaneously. According to Google’s Director of Search, Elizabeth Tucker, the collective changes are expected to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal web content ranking in search result core ranking systems by a staggering 40%.
So how exactly is Google achieving these lofty search result quality goals? The company states that this core update has refined its understanding of what constitutes an unhelpful webpage—those with a poor user experience or that were primarily created for search rankings rather than people. This includes sites crafted specifically to target very specific search queries, which will now be scrutinized more thoroughly by Google’s updated algorithms as part of the March 2024 core update.
Google has overhauled its core systems to better identify truly helpful content using innovative new ranking signals and approaches. While the company remains coy on the details, it’s clear that quality, expertise and trustworthiness are being pushed to the forefront.
The Helpful Content Update Becomes Core
Adding more muscle to this quality-focused push, Google has fully incorporated its Helpful Content system into the March 2024 core update ranking algorithms. This move effectively retires the standalone ‘Helpful Content Update’ that webmasters had become accustomed to.
The premise behind the Helpful Content system is straightforward—content should provide a satisfying experience for people using search engines, not just be optimized to rank well in search results. Its quality classifiers aim to elevate pages that:
- Have a beneficial purpose and high E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
- Provide complete, clear information from credible sources
- Don’t use extensive automation or AI content generation purely for manipulating search rankings
- Are sites created primarily for people, not search ranking
With this Google March 2024 update now ingrained into the core algorithm, Google can comprehensively prioritize content by humans for humans across all queries in their search results.
Cracking Down on Spam and Abuse
The quality cleanup for search results goes well beyond the March 2024 core update itself. Google has simultaneously released several new spam updates that expand the company’s policies—and ability to detect—a wide range of site reputation abuse and manipulative behaviors.
1. Scaled Content Abuse
First up is the “Scaled Content Abuse” update. Scaled content abuse has been increasing over the past few years to try and manipulate search engine rankings, resulting in low quality content from Google’s search results. The March 2024 core update on scaled content abuse is an expansion of Google’s previous stance against spammy, auto-generated content. The new policy takes aim at any method of creating pages at scale, whether through automation, cheap labor, or a combination, to primarily manipulate search rankings and gain ranking benefits in search engines’ ranking systems.
Google states it will use algorithms and manual actions to crack down on low-quality pages that “pretend to have answers but fail to deliver helpful content” and consequently lower the quality of Google search results. The company gave the example of query-stuffed pages that simply regurgitate the question without providing a satisfactory answer.
2. Expired Domain Abuse
Expired domain abuse is a practice where site owners repurpose expired dormains with low-quality content to boost search ranking. The expired domain abuse new policy explicitly prohibits the practice of acquiring expired domains simply to repurpose them for low-quality, search-ranked content. The idea is to block attempts at misleading searchers into thinking that such content is part of an established, reputable site rather than expired domains.
3. Site Reputation Abuse ("Parasite SEO")
Perhaps the most impactful new policy targets what some in the SEO community call “parasite SEO”—the practice of publishing low-quality content on reputable third-party sites to capitalize on the hosting site’s strong reputation. Previous efforts included for example, someone who may publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website.
Google’s “Site Reputation Abuse” policy makes it clear this type of behavior with such content, done solely to manipulate search visibility without oversight from the host site, will be considered spam. However, legitimate sponsored content and publications host advertising content intended for a site’s regular audience is still permitted.
Conclusion
For websites potentially affected by these widespread quality enhancements, it’s now a waiting game. Google has stated that sites negatively impacted shouldn’t necessarily try to “fix” things right away. Instead, the company recommends continuing to produce satisfying, people-first content and evaluating any dips after the updates fully roll out over the next few weeks.
While the short-term effects may be chaotic, the long-term vision is clearer than ever: Google is accelerating its efforts to reward quality, credible content and purge the web of unhelpful, manipulative tactics. In the grand war on web spam, Update 3.24 represents the search giant’s biggest offensive yet in improving Google Search. By implementing these measures, Google aims to collectively reduce low quality content and elevate the overall search experience for all users.
