Google Core Update March 2024: Google is Cutting Spam Content by 40%

Google just rolled out an extensive update to its search algorithms and spam policies to remove the lowest-quality content from its search engine.

In a nutshell:

• Google is cracking down on spam. This update aims to remove low-quality, unoriginal, unhelpful content in search results by 40%.
• Google’s new anti-spam policies will specifically target site reputation abuse, expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse, and other manipulative practices.

Here’s an excerpt from Google’s announcement:

March 2024 Google Core Update: Everything You Need to Know

Google began fine-tuning its ranking systems back in August 2022 to cut down on spam content and abusive behavior. This new update is integrating insights gained from that initiative.

Removing Unhelpful, Unoriginal Content from Search

According to Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Management at Google, the March 2024 core update focuses on refining Google’s ranking system in determining whether a website is unhelpful, offers a poor user experience, or was created for search engines instead of people.

These updates are expected to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40% while also sending more traffic to helpful, high-quality sites.

Keeping Spam Out

Google has long implemented robust spam-blocking systems to safeguard search results against the proliferation of low-quality content.

The March 2024 Core Update is introducing three new policies to better address manipulative practices that aim to game the system.

Scaled Content Abuse

While Google isn’t anti-AI per se, it has always maintained a strong stance against the use of automation to churn out low-quality content for the sole purpose of manipulating search rankings.

With scaled content creation methods becoming more sophisticated, distinguishing between machine-written content and human-written content is now more challenging than ever.

In response to these technology advancements, Google is training its sights on abusive behavior — specifically the practice of mass-producing content to artificially inflate search rankings, regardless of whether it’s written by AI, humans, or a combination of both.

This update allows Google to take action against content with little to no value such as pages that pretend to be authoritative sources for popular search queries but ultimately fall short of providing genuinely helpful content.

Site Reputation Abuse

Sometimes, even websites known for their quality content may feature subpar content from third-party sources that are aiming to leverage the strong reputation of the hosting site.

For instance, a third party might post a product review on a reputable educational website to boost its search rankings by association. This can be confusing or misleading for visitors, who may expect a consistent standard of content across the site.

Google will now classify third-party, low-value content as spam if it was created solely for ranking purposes and without keen oversight from the website owner.

Expired Domain Abuse

Google is also cracking down on the practice of buying expired domains to boost the search ranking of low-quality content. This can lead users to believe that the new content is affiliated with the previous site, which might not be the case.

The March 2024 Core Update is already rolling, and just this morning we’ve seen thousands of websites getting wiped out!

A marketer shared this in the ZimmWriter group:

They lost 10+ niche websites built with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity Pro, and ZimmWriter.

Google cracked down on them all, in a single day!

Adios.

😰

These are websites with 200 to 1,000 blog posts getting 300-500 visitors per day.

All that time and effort that went into publishing 2-4 articles daily has gone kaput!

Why?

Because they created content from a just-built-for-spam, nonhelpful AI writer and now they’re getting taken down.

Meanwhile, the BrandWell website now ranks for 28,000+ keywords organically using our own SEO content writer!

They shoulda used BrandWell… 😅

Google’s focus in search has always been clear: Your content needs to be helpful.

Google doesn’t want abusive content – which is defined as content published 100% for manipulating search rankings.

They know that spam simply frustrates traffic and doesn’t help real humans find a real answer.

Google updates will never harm us if we’re always making sure the content we publish is original, helpful, and usable — the good old basis of what makes content readable and rank-worthy.

Google’s extra E in E-E-A-T which was added last December 2022 (right after ChatGPT came out – not by chance!) reflects their focus on stopping the mass spam onslaught.

At BrandWell, this is our core focus: creating helpful, deeply-researched, on-point content.

It’s our goal to give you access to the BEST all-in-one content marketing automation platform that immediately generates on-point content ready to publish, StraightOuttaAI, for any keyword.

And with Deep Research coming out, our long-form writer will not only generate well-written content but formulate on-point opinions and takeaways and cite CURRENT facts.

From the very beginning, when we created the first ever AI long-form SEO content writer, we focused on humanizing content and AI detection.

In fact, we’ve put tons of revenue straight back into the development of our tool to build the most robust and helpful SEO content writer that produces undetectable, humanlike content out of a proprietary multi-LLM stack.

Our SEO content product suite, trademarked under the name RankWell®, is getting some major upgrades this month to make it even more of a bullet-proof solution for you.

“We humanize content and make it actually helpful to the end reader and things are about to go to a whole other level soon. Can’t say much right now, but stay tuned, it’s going to be incredible when you see what’s possible.” — Justin McGill, founder of BrandWell

Soon, we’ll be able to build an entire database of research per SEO blog post, besides conducting real-time SERP analysis that crawls everything on your topic.

Hundreds of pages will go into the background research, building the best bank of facts for a single blog post so we can generate real-time, helpful insights.

A multi-LLM stack we fine-tune daily generates the content from there, and our advanced SEO editor tells you exactly what you need to do to publish #StraightOuttaAI.

Learn more about BrandWell’s RankWell®.

Were You Hit by the Google Update?

If you are worried about how this new update will impact your websites, here are two ways to find out:

1. Search for your website in Google like: “site:website.com” and see if results are showing.

2. Check your Google Search Console, and see if you lost any rankings or got a spam alert (left sidebar, Checking Security & Manual Actions), like this one:

What Can You Do to Avoid Getting Killed by Google?

Our amazing SEO strategist at BrandWell, Farnaz Kia, has been analyzing the types of content that are getting the axe from Google and it looks to center around:

1. Mass detectable content (better use an undetectable SEO writer like RankWell).
2. Articles that beat around the bush and don’t give a clear, straight answer to the search term. Since Google is partnering with Reddit, we believe an immediate/short answer equals helpful content.
3. Link farms, guest post websites.
4. Websites with poor UX and lots of ads (this seems to be the most common case).

To maintain your good standing in search engines, don’t do any of the above.

Google is giving website owners two months to update their pages and make sure their content adheres to the new reputation policies which will be enforced on May 5, 2024. Other updates related to the March 2024 Core Update will be implemented this week.

“Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there will always be areas where we can improve. We’ll continue to work hard at keeping low-quality content on Search to low levels, and showing more information created to help people.” — Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product Management at Google

Entire websites built with bulk spam tools are going down like ice cream melting in the desert. 😰

Not if you use the world’s best tool for creating undetectable SEO content.

Click here to learn more about BrandWell’s RankWell®.