Double Google update: action on content usefulness and spam

There had been a lack of news about Google’s activities for several months now, but today we found out why: beyond the focus on the development of AI products such as Gemini and Search Generative Experience (which is not yet available in Europe, by the way), the search engine team was in fact working on as many as two very sensitive overall updates, announced precisely in these hours. Thus, the March 2024 Core Update and the March 2024 Spam Update, which differ from the classic interventions we have become accustomed to over the years and make specific focus on useful content and new anti-spam regulations, have started simultaneously. Let’s find out everything Google has told us and everything these updates imply for our businesses.

March 2024 Core Update: improvements to recognize useful content

It’s not just another core update, and this time Google says so directly in the article presenting the intervention: the March 2024 Core Update is more complex, involves changes to multiple active ranking systems, and will take longer to implement.

To be precise, Chris Nelson of the Google Search Quality team explains that this update affects multiple “ranking systems” used by Google’s algorithms (and of course he doesn’t pause to reveal which ones) and that, most importantly, it marks an evolution in the way the search engine recognizes and identifies the usefulness of content.

In practice, as Barry Schwartz summarizes, this March update contains multiple updates at its core because it touches several systems within the main update, which will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Precisely because of this complexity, its full implementation could take up to a month, and Nelson anticipates that “it is likely that there will be more fluctuations in the rankings than a normal core update, as different systems are fully updated and reinforce each other.”