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, huge brands and corporations, and reddit.
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. The frequency that certain huge branded websites now show up implies lots of manual intervention in the algorithm to hoist these sites to the top, seemingly regardless of the actual value offered by the result.
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, whether those offences can be forgiven and whether there's actually any point given that the vertical the site was in may have been handed over to the mega brands anyway. So in summary, probably, but unlikely.
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.
