On March 5, 2024, Google announced its broad core update for 2024. It is safe to say that this update is aggressive and has shocked the entire SEO community. The main idea behind this March 2024 update is that Google plans to remove 40% of unhelpful content from the internet. Why this update? Simply put, Google is the go-to search engine for everyone, whether they are looking for information, products, or services. However, many SEO experts are using content not to help users get the information they need but simply to rank their site and get traffic. Due to this unhelpful and AI-generated content flooding the market, the quality of the content is declining, and spam is increasing. Thus, this new update from Google is its way to combat low-quality content and ensure only deserving sites rank in the search engine results.
On March 5, 2024, Google rolled out a new update, which is a bundle of three updates. This includes:
Broad Core Update: The first core update of 2024.
Helpful Content Update: The last one in the series of helpful content updates.
Spam Update 2024: An aggressive update to reduce and control website spamming in 2024.
Let’s discuss all three in detail below.
Google comes up with two broad core updates per year. On March 5th, the first broad core update for 2024 was announced. It will take a complete month for this update to completely roll out. Here is the purpose of this update:
The main goal of this Move is to improve the ranking of helpful content while lowering the ranking and traffic for websites with unhelpful content.
It means that if a website publishes bulk content, whether human or AI-generated, just for SEO purposes—to get a higher ranking or traffic—without thinking whether it is valuable for the users or not, the rank of the site will go down.
This core update means 40% of content from Google will be removed. Only content that is educational or informative will remain on Google.
Solution: Focus On Natural Content. Don’t Dump The Direct Keywords And AI Generated Content
It is the last update in the helpful content update and has now become part of the core update of Google. The goal of this update is to ensure websites with valuable content rank highly on Google. But if your site has only content for gaining traffic, Google will remove it from search engine results.
It is an aggressive update with severe implications for the overall health and performance of the website.
After this update, if a website has 1000 pages and 900 of them have repetitive, duplicate, or unhelpful content, Google will not only reduce the ranking of these pages.
But it will also rank down the pages with informative or helpful content. In short, there is a site-wide signal; even one bad page can decrease the ranking of the entire website.
Spam Update
Spam Update is a three-course update to control spamming on websites. It includes three types of abuse: scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse. Let’s discuss it in detail.
Scaled Content Abuse
It is tragic for those websites that publish bulky, low-quality, and unhelpful content to simply gain traffic or get their ranking up. If any SEO expert follows this tactic, Google’s scam update will push their ranking down immediately. Even if you remove such pages and start writing helpful content, Google will not rank your website normally. In short, a website with such content has no future!
Site reputation abuse
Many websites have high authority in their niche. But to rank in SERPs, they publish articles unrelated to their niche. It is known as parasite SEO. They do this to increase their brand authority. Unfortunately, the site reputation abuse update means such sites will see their ranking go down. Furthermore, SEO experts have 2 months until May 5th to remove unrelated content and ensure their website ranking is safe.
An example of this is when a site authoritative in SEO starts writing about celebrity trends to gain traffic; if they do so, this update will immediately reduce their ranking.
Expired Domain Abuse
If you use any expired domain to gain backlinks from that domain, your site will be penalized. Misusing expired domains to get a ranking for low-quality content is a big no. That does not mean you cannot use an expired domain to write new content; that is fine. But if you use it to gain backlinks, you will immediately find your site or page removed from Google.
