Analysis of the March 2024 Google updates: winners and losers
Let’s start with the known facts: last March 5, Google officially released two updates at the same time – March 2024 Core Update and March 2024 Spam Update – which obviously shuffled the rankings a bit on a global scale. The effects on the Italian SERPs arrived a bit late, but nonetheless they were noticeable, and starting from the monitoring of our SEOZoom SERP Observatory we analyzed what was the concrete impact of these two updates on the sites positioned on Google Italy, thus identifying who gained traffic and positions and which sites instead collapsed after the updates.
Google’s March 2024 updates, situation analysis
The first difficulty in analyzing the impact of Google’s changes on SERPs lies in the fact, precisely, that the interventions were two and rather broad-spectrum.
The anti-spam update, which was completed after about two weeks (and thus last March 20) targeted new illicit behaviors such as large-scale production of low-quality or unoriginal content, illicit use of expired domains, and abuse of host site reputation.
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In addition to the algorithmic changes, the anti-spam policies have also caused another side effect: Google has in fact initiated numerous manual actions to address pure spam issues, and in this regard a study by Originality found a surge in websites being de-indexed completely-with strong correlation to the misuse of AI, since 100 percent of such sites were publishing at least some AI-generated posts and, more importantly, half of the sites had 90-100 percent of the posts created by artificial intelligence alone.
Instead, core udate is still in place-in fact, Google anticipated that the implementation would take about a month, twice as long as usual-which affected ratings on the definition of “useful content,” now included in Google’s core ranking systems. However, its impact on SERPs has been substantial, with various fluctuations in rankings, as also seen in our charts.
Winners and losers: SEOZoom’s study of the effects of Google’s updates
Complicating the picture, then, is that volatility has also been compounded by a noticeable amount of reversals, i.e., sites recording sudden losses followed by immediate recoveries or, conversely, of positive peaks and equally rapid declines.
For this reason, too, therefore, credit must be given to the advice that has come from Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, who has urged SEOs to be patient and cautious, stressing the importance of waiting for the update to be completed before making significant c