Google tend to announce Core Algorithm updates every few months, and this March, they’ve announced their latest update for 2024.
The update is more complex than usual as changes have been made to multiple core systems.
In summary, the update will reduce the number of low-quality, unhelpful, and unoriginal content in search results. It also includes updated spam policies, targeting scaled content, site reputation and expired domain abuse.
How to know if your website has been hit with a Google Algorithm update?
Google Core updates can have a detrimental effect on your websites traffic. If you see a drop in traffic during a rollout of the update, it’s most likely caused because Google is penalising your site.
In Google Analytics, we can see whether the drop in traffic is purely organic and usually the whole site is effective, rather than just one or two pages.
Google’s Ranking Systems
Google use automated ranking systems that look at various signals and reviews all web pages that have been indexed. Its aim is to always present the most relevant, useful results for the searcher.
It’s constantly reviewing these systems through testing and provides updates to them so it’s always meeting search intent, providing the most helpful experience for the user.
Update: Improved quality rankings
Low quality, unoriginal results – looking at content that’s unhelpful, provides a poor user experience and created for search engines instead of people e.g. content has been created primarily to target very specific search queries.
Update: New spam updates
Scaled content abuse – this will review low-quality, unoriginal content that is produced at scale either through automation, people, or a mixture of both. For example, content pretending to have answers to popular searches but failing to actually be helpful.
Site reputation abuse – this is where trusted websites host low-quality, third-party content to capitalise on the hosted sites strong reputation. For example, publishing payday loan reviews on an educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site.
Google can see that this content could be something that hasn’t been approved by the site owner and uploaded solely to increase rankings for the third-party. As the content isn’t relevant to the topics the website covers, it can be deemed as misleading to the audience.
Expired domain abuse – when someone purchases an expired domain that did have a high domain authority. They would then repurpose the domain to host new content (of low quality and no real value), just to try and boost their rankings.
Content created for link manipulation
Google are penalising sites that are creating low quality content that’s been written to manipulate links and ranking signals.
Link manipulation is a tactic where people artificially enhance a websites visibility by generating or gaining links through unnatural practices.
These unnatural tactics that can cause your site to be penalised include:
- Paid for links where a network of sites is established with the intention of directing links to contextually relevant pages.
- Using private blog networks to add links to other websites.
- Link farming, where a series of websites all link to each other to improve search rankings.
- Link stuffing, where someone adds an excessive number of internal links to a website.
- Guest posting when you can see it’s been created just for gaining backlinks because it the topic isn’t relevant to the site posting the content.
- Spinning the same articles to create multiple variations and linking them to your site.
- Adding irrelevant or promotional links within blog comments and collaborating in link exchange schemes providing a ‘link for a link’.
What we can do?
The March update will take a month to fully roll out, so we need to monitor performance and adapt to these changes promptly to maintain or improve search rankings.
In order to monitor performance, we should first have a look at keyword rankings, have they moved in a negative direction?
We will audit your site and review which pages have dropped in keywords and conclude on why this has happened – technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO.
Competitors will be monitored so that our actions are positive and the changes we make are insight driven.
The content on your site will be reviewed and a plan will be put in place to optimise. Checks will include, is it written for people-first? Is it helpful? Does it provide more value than the results that are dominating search results?
Google wants more unique, fresh content, that talks about new stuff that people haven’t seen before. This should be seen as an opportunity.
We will continue to monitor performance and the changes we make so we can adjust or revert where needed. The data we will gather will help us make informed decisions.
How long does it take to recover from a core update?
If your site has been affected dramatically because of the Core update, a significant amount of work needs to be done in order to recover.
As it’s a site wide problem, just making changes to a few pages won’t be enough to recover. The search engine wants to see a dramatic improvement on the quality of your content, and this will be reviewed across the whole site.
By improving the content on your site, you will start to see a gradual increase in traffic over time. It could even be that the site doesn’t fully recover until the next Core update is released.
How to stay ahead and keep up with Google Algorithm updates?
We are constantly monitoring performance, using tools such as Search Console, Google Analytics and Semrush.
The metrics we look at include:
- A decline in website traffic
- A negative impact on conversions
- A drop in keyword ranking positions
Set up Google Alerts so that you receive a notification whenever an update has been mentioned online.
Read, read, and read some more. We like staying up to date with blogs such as Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land.
User experience is key, serve a purpose every time you create new content. Keep an eye on site speed and ensure your internal links are relevant.
We can also review SERP volatility for each sector in Semrush. It highlights daily changes in rankings for each sector, providing a volatility score out of 10. The higher the score, the more likely an update has been introduced by Google.
Keep your content up to date and prioritise content that people want to read. If you think you’d been hit by a Google algortihm update or just need some help with your SEO efforts, get in touch with our team today.