Google March 2024 Core Update
Google just announced the March 2024 Core Update.
This core update has been long teased and awaited by the SEO community, with the last core update being in November 2023.
The March 2024 Core Update aims to show less “spammy” content:
This is designed to improve the quality of Search by showing less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful.
Specifically, Google wants to target 3 main issues:
Expired Domain Abuse
The expired domain abuse aims to target sites that are clearly using an expired domain to gain some of its signals, while hosting low-quality/irrelevant content:
Expired domain abuse is where an expired domain name is purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate Search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users.
Site Reputation Abuse
This is an interesting one, where they want to hit those sites that have many trust signals, but allow hosting of “low-quality” content. E.g. a education site that allows casino sites to purchase articles on their site, in order to rank high on Google:
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.
I’m curious how this will play out for sites like Medium and Reddit. I’ve seen signs that Google is better able to decide if the content hosted on a user-generated site like Medium is worth ranking — if you make a post on Medium about a casino, you’re not likely to rank. But if you make a post about a new Linux distribution, you’re likely to rank. So hopefully this will not hit sites with actual value-providing user generated content. We will see.
Scaled Content Abuse
This last one is a bit vague, but essentially refers to sites that generated content at scale, with little to no extra value added:
Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating Search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it’s created.
I have a feeling that they may be targeting sites with auto generated AI content at scale, or those sites with content like “Best insurance in City A”, “Best insurance in City B”, .. (insert 100000 other cities).
My Personal Take
I hope they are able to distinguish between auto generated content that provide actual value, and content that provide no value. Here, I’m thinking about my own website, https://lenspricer.com/, which compares contact lens prices. It does this by generating the pages for each contact lens model, and showing the actual prices collected from across the web.
This means that I have 200+ pages with “apparent” similar content, while in reality each page is tackling a very different problem, as each page shows prices for each unique contact lens, which doesn’t make sense to aggregate into a single page.
Fingers crossed that Google gets this one right, but time will tell. In any case, I’m happy that they are doing something to tackle the spam problem that has been rampant lately.
