We’re now about a week into Google’s March 2024 Spam and Core Updates, and boy, has it been a busy week. Over the past week, we’ve seen some interesting volatility in Google search rankings, some related to these algorithmic updates and some related to Google issuing manual actions on updated spam policies.
It’s not done yet. It’s important to note that these Google search updates are far from over. Google said that the core update will take about a month to fully roll out, and we’ll see several updated systems within the core update over the course of those few weeks. The core update will also take about two weeks to roll out. We’re only a week away from the update, so we should expect more ranking changes in Google search results in the coming weeks.
Chronology of changes. Here’s a quick timeline of the changes we’ve seen over the past week:
March 5: Google announced the March 2024 Google Spam and Basic updates. March 6 and 7: Google issued many manual actions on spam policy violations and saw many sites being pulled from Google Search. March 8 and 9 – We can have seen the first signs of the basic update and/or spam that affects and affects site rankings algorithmically. March 10-11: Google seemed to calm down a bit, but at the same time, a number of reports (not many) showed that some sites were affected by both algorithmic changes and manual actions. saw some investment (at least temporarily).
Overlapping updates and confusion. With so many changes to Google Search, it’s hard to keep track of what’s affecting what. We have a core update, a spam update, manual actions, and also the Core Web Vitals change today. This means a lot of changes and can confuse many SEOs and site owners.
What is a bit curious is that Google has said that they try not to release overlapping updates. In 2021Danny Sullivan, the Google search link, said that they try not to overlap updates and reiterated this in 2022 saying, “We’ve worked really hard to keep updates separate from each other, or as little overlap as possible, to help creators understand more.”
he he reiterated than with this past update, adding, “We generally try to avoid that, but we had both the core update and the spam update ready, and eventually we’ll push updates that we think will improve the quality of search results. Manual actions are not an update. New spam policies are not an algorithmic update. So these are not “updates” that “overlap” the core and spam updates.
We generally try to avoid this, but we had both the core update and the spam update ready, and we’ll eventually push updates that we think will improve the quality of our search results. Manual actions are not an update. The new spam policies are not an algorithmic update. So those…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 7, 2024
examples I posted a number of examples of these changes in the Round table of search enginesbut here’s a quick post on X of some charts:
I have several documented sites that reversed course, but now some are showing a drop again. Note that some reversals are for sites affected by manual actions for pure spam, while others were algorithmically affected by the March core update. See screenshot below (pure spam penalty).… pic.twitter.com/DpZaBtquvd
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 12, 2024
Why we care Seeing these updates posted daily can be fun for me as I write about this. But for SEOs and site owners, it can be very stressful. It probably makes sense to wait for these various updates to complete and see where the dust settles.
Until then, you can continue to follow Google’s advice and improve the quality of your site’s content and user experience. This is never a bad thing to focus on at any time.
That said, we’ll keep you posted on the status of these Google search algorithm update releases.
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