This month Google is rolling out its latest core update. This March 2024 Core Update, including the corresponding spam update, is going to be a significant one as the search engine is aiming to reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content in search results” by 40%.

March 2024 Core Update marks a milestone in Google’s fight against unhelpful, spammy content. The Search Engine has announced that there is not a single mechanism to evaluate the helpfulness of a webpage like the Helpful Content System it announced in 2022.

The company has now switched to using multiple signals and approaches to find reliable information on a per-page basis. Google also uses some side-wide signals, but page-level factors are still key for the core ranking system.

Here, I have compiled takeaways from Google’s March 2024 Core Update to help site owners and SEO professionals in Nepal.

Be wary of mass-produced content

AI has been the main talk of the town within the content marketing industry, with many companies incorporating the technology into their content creation process — even some with success.

However, with the new update, Google is targeting sites that rely too heavily on the new automation tools and don’t focus on providing value to the user.

So, if you have been churning out hundreds of posts, with or without generative AI, to rank on Google, you should be worried.

High Authority Backlinks Don’t Matter Much (Compared to Past)

Google recently updated its document to reduce links to simply a factor instead of an important factor in determining the relevancy of the page.

This change can be further explained by Google’s new policy against Site reputation abuse. A site reputation abuse is when a site tries to take advantage of the ranking signals of a bigger site using manipulative techniques.

Google says its link manipulation is when content is added to a site with the sole purpose of transferring the ranking signal. This includes the practise of paid backlinks, use of expired domain and Private Broadcasting Networks to improve search performance.

Increased Manual Action

Most of the time, your pages are crawled, evaluated, and ranked by Google bot and ranking algorithm. Thus, change in search engine ranking is automatic.

However, there are times when pages non-compliant with Google’s guidelines is human-reviewed and hence slapped a penalty. The penalty here means deindexing or wiping out the site from Google SERP.

Manual action is pretty rare, but there has been a considerable number of deindexing reported after the announcement of the March 2024 Core update.

The sites being targeted are AI-scaled websites and websites associated with them, like under the same Google account.

What to do if you think you are hit?

Google March 2024 Core Update is a complex one and will take around a month to implement properly. You will experience a lot of rank fluctuation during this time.

If your rank has dropped, you don’t have to worry unless you doubt a manual action. As such, I recommend checking the Search Console.

Otherwise, wait for the update to roll out completely before taking any steps