Google March 2024 Core Update Rolling Out Now

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Mar 6, 2024

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Google announced the March 2024 core update has now started to roll out and that this core update will take up to a month to fully roll out because it has updates to a few systems within the core ranking system. Google’s Helpful content system is now also part of the core update.

In addition, Google also released the March 2024 spam updates, with new spam policies. I dig into those spam updates and policy changes in super detail over here.

Google says this core update should lead to a reduction in unhelpful, low-quality, unoriginal content in its search results by 40%. I spoke with Google in detail about this update, so this story will go through what I know about this March 2024 core update. I also covered this in detail at Search Engine Land.

Maybe this set of updates will resolve most of those search quality issues we’ve all seen over the past several weeks. Maybe this is what Google has been telling us (not) to buckle up for and has been coming to improve search quality for many months now – is this the Google answer.

It is important to note that with this March 2024 core update, Google will be pushing out updates to different systems with in the overall core system throughout the next few weeks. So you will likely see a lot of fluctuations on various days over the next 3-4 weeks. Google even said this update will result in more ranking changes than previous core updates.

Currently, I am seeing some limited chatter about ranking volatility but nothing out of the norm. Plus the tracking tools are not spiking yet. I am not sure if this update has kicked in just yet.

Google March 2024 Core Update Quick Facts:

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

• Name: Google March 2024 Broad Core Update
• Launched: March 5, 2024 at around 12 pm ET

Rollout: Will take up to a month to fully roll out – numerous pushes will happen to numerous core systems during the rollout

Targets: It looks at all types of content

Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages

Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.

Impact: Google said it will result in a 40% reduction in low-qualoty unoriginal and unhelpful content in its search results.

Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.

Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.

Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

Here is the post on X of this:

As part of our news, we’ve also shared that we now use a variety of innovative signals and approaches rather than a single system to identify helpful content. We’ve added a new FAQ page to help explain this change: https://t.co/mrtkWVJYWV

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) March 5, 2024

March 2024 Core Update Details

I spoke with a few people at Google about this, including Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product at Google Search. I will say Elizabeth Tucker really knew this update inside and out and it was refreshing talking with her.

This core update is unlike most previous core updates in that Google will push this update out over three to four weeks. There will be multiple updates to the core ranking system within this timeframe. Elizabeth Tucker told me that several core ranking systems will be updated in this time frame, they are all part of the overall core ranking system but each one will be updated within that system. So you might think you are fine and not hit by this core update today, but next week, you might get hit by another core system update to this March 2024 core update. Google will let us know when this update is done rolling out but until then, you may be hit by something core update related during this 3-4 week period.

Elizabeth said, “This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.”

“We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content in Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%,” she wrote.

Chris Nelson from the Search Quality team added, “The March 2024 core update is a more complex update than our usual core updates, involving changes to multiple core systems. It also marks an evolution in how we identify the helpfulness of content.” “As this is a complex update, the rollout may take up to a month. It’s likely there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update, as different systems get fully updated and reinforce each other,” he added.