The Google updates from March 2024 will probably be remembered in the same way as the earlier Panda updates that shook the results to the core, no pun intended, this was a step-change from Google and a devastating blow to small publishers.
What happened?
On 5th March 2024 Google announced they'd started rolling out the core and spam updates. The spam update took around 2 weeks and the core update an unprecedented 7+ weeks, Google claim 45 days but from our stats it was clearly running until beyond the 24th April.
These updates were supposed to rid the search results of up to 40% of spammy pages, great!
Who were the winners?
reddit, forums, large publishing companies and big brands. The frequency that certain branded websites now show up points at manual intervention in the algorithm to hoist these sites to the top.
Who were the losers?
Any website that the classifier decided had some unhelpful content, spammy structure or some other undisclosed low quality metric like number of ads on page.
From the analysis we've done this looks like a blunt instrument that had little ability to understand the content on a website beyond an overall classification or penalty that's then used as a multiplier to demote sites to varying degrees.
Can you recover from this update?
I think this depends on the site, what the list of offences is that Google's thinks it's guilty of and whether those offences can be forgiven. Having said that there is also now the question of if there's any point in recovering given that the vertical may have been handed over to the mega brands anyway. So in summary, probably, but unlikely to be where you were before.
Is there any point in doing SEO for Google anymore?
Yes, you might as well optimise your website from the point of view that doing this is good practice anyway. What's no longer a good idea is basing your business on Google, if you're reliant on their search or ad platforms for the bulk of your income you're hugely at risk of a sudden policy or ranking update from them, we've seen several of these in 2024 and it's only April.
In the past you could base your business on having a steady flow of traffic from Google, it used to be the case that changes in ranking were recoverable, now Google seems to have markers on websites that it wants to bury and it seems there's little that can be done to reverse this decision. They won't provide an explanation, just a vague list of guidelines, several of which they flout themselves.
Conclusion
Whatever Google's motivation is behind the scenes this update seems like a new beginning, one that seems a little less fair on smaller businesses. Things have been heading in this direction for years so arguably anyone caught out by this update should have seen this coming, but then that's easy to say when it's not your home repayments that are on the line because of decisions made in California that, on the face of it, don't really seem to do anything other than shuffle things around in the favour of the big guy.
Update ... the impact on small publishers
Since writing this I've read many examples of the impact this update has had on people, it seems like it's been even worse than I guessed it would be. The saddest part is that there's a common thread connecting these people and websites together. They mostly seem to be people who started websites from a genuine interest or passion about something and their websites became businesses allowing them to work for themselves. Many of them appear to have created fantastic small businesses employing other creative people to help grow what they offered the searchers Google sent their way. And sadly, all of them seem to sit on the same trajectory that started to head south at the end of 2023, with March 2024 being the new low, in most cases low enough to force the websites to reduce staffing and consider whether it's sustainable to keep going at all.
Whichever way you spin this Google doesn't look great, did they go after this traffic to hand it over to the big guys and not care about the collateral damage, or did they just not realise the impact this would have? That's callousness or incompetence, take your pick, it's certainly not the Google I remember from the early 2000s.
This feels like another step towards a smaller web where individuals with passion can't compete with big companies just through hard work and creativity. I really hope we see a new search super power arrive soon that's built on the principles Google used to have, that's probably the only chance the web has at getting back some of that opportunity for creators.
