How to react to the March 2024 Google algorithm update

Those three little words – “Google algorithm update” – can so easily strike fear into the heart of a website owner. Probably even more so this week, when it was announced that the roll out of the biggest Google algorithm update in some time has begun.

It only began on Tuesday, but it’s kicked off in conjunction with a significant round of manual spam penalties, already wiping some websites off the face of Google. So in this week’s blog, we’re taking a look at what’s expected from this update and a general plan of action for reacting to algorithm updates.

Google updates aren’t rare – there are understood to be around 500-600 updates each year which tweak elements of the algorithm. Alongside this, there are usually 3-4 ‘core’ algorithm updates each year, which are a more significant shift in how the algorithm works.

This update is expected to be larger as it involves updating multiple systems rather than just one (as is usually the case with a core update). Because of this, it’s fair to expect more fluctuation in site rankings over the next month while it rolls out.

Is it time to panic?

Panic can lead people to make drastic changes to their sites in the midst of the roll-out – which can make things worse.

If you’re creating good-quality content with a clear target audience in mind, then it’s likely that you don’t have too much to worry about – you’re in line with the direction Google’s been moving in for some time. Whilst this approach doesn’t guarantee you won’t lose traffic (there are a huge number of factors that go into assessing websites), this should be an indication to breathe a little easier, stick to the plan and bide your time before making any drastic changes to your site.

If, however, your site falls into one or more of the categories that are getting targeted with this update, you need to keep a close eye on your site and might need to take some pre-emptive action (read more about the ‘site reputation abuse’ policy below).

What should we see from the March 2024 Google update?

This is a big update, but from what we’ve been told so far there’s a very clear focus – Google is going after spam content, and it’s going after it hard.

This comes after months of complaints about the quantity of spam showing up in search results, and it appears that Google’s been taking note. Remember that Google’s model relies on people getting good search results so they keep returning (helping Google earn some more advertising revenue.) If the results aren’t great, users will disappear.

In order to target spam content – and reach its’ aim of reducing low-quality content in the results pages by 40% – Google has developed three new spam policies that are rolling out as part of this update.

Alongside this, we’ve been told there will be multiple changes to core systems, including how Google identifies the helpfulness of content.

Elizabeth Tucker, ‘New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search‘, Google’s ‘The Keyword’.

Google’s new spam policies:

The three new spam policies rolling out with this update are designed to drastically reduce the spam and low-quality content which shows up in search results through common tactics. Here’s what they’re targeting:

Expired domain abuse

As the internet’s got busier, it’s become harder to buy a brand new domain. Most people end up buying a domain that’s previously been owned and used for another website. Often, the expired domain still has backlinks pointing at it – and blackhat SEO tactics have sprung up, like buying these domains to get a jump-start on a new site’s authority, or 301 redirecting it to a different site to try and reap the benefit of the backlinks.

Google specifically notes that it’s still okay to buy a previously owned domain which is relevant to the business, and create a website that’s designed to genuinely help people. This is common practice due to the scarcity of new domains. Google has lots of other systems in place to measure the helpfulness of content.

Scaled content abuse

AI has quickly changed the game when it comes to content production. For some, it’s a tool to assist with research and content creation – and for others, it’s a way of quickly adding a massive volume of content to a website, in order to rank for more keywords and quickly grow the levels of traffic.

This policy sticks to the spirit of previous Google spam policies – which states that content must be made for people first, rather than for ranking. Ranking systems like E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) are in place to help promote content which is original and has been created by people with real-world experience.

The reality with bulk-generated AI content is that it’s less likely to meet these requirements, and so far the reports of sites being decimated by this policy focus on sites which included significant amounts of AI-generated content. (Here’s just a few of the sites reported as being hit by a penalty)

It’s worth keeping in mind that this policy isn’t entirely targeted at AI (although a lot of sites that get hit will be in this category). It’s going after low-quality, scaled content created in any form, whether that’s by humans or automation. This could also include sites buying huge amount of low-quality, human-written content, or those using programmatic SEO which hasn’t been designed to meet the needs of users.

This policy doesn’t mean that either AI or programmatic SEO are inherently bad to use. But both tactics need to be used carefully, with a constant focus on providing content that better meets the needs of users.

Site reputation abuse

The third new spam policy targets another long-running tactic, often referred to as Parasite SEO, which has come under increased criticism recently. Site reputation abuse covers third-party content which is hosted on a high authority first-party website. Due to site-wide signals, the third-party content benefits from the authority of the host domain, whilst not necessarily being high quality content itself. This leads to lower quality content having unduly inflated rankings in the search engine results.

If you’re hosting content that is irrelevant or low-quality, you’ll need to noindex the content before this spam policy comes into play in May. This will drop the third-party content out of Google’s search results and should help protect the rest of your site. Going forwards, guidelines on third-party content creation can help to ensure that the content you host provides value to your audience.

How to react to a Google algorithm update:

Alright then folks, buckle in! We don’t know yet what the effects of this algorithm update will be, but here’s a general guide for dealing with an update:

1. Set up monitoring (if you don’t already have it)

First things first – if you don’t have any monitoring set up, then you’re going to have a hard time working out how your site’s been affected by an update.

The absolute basics that I set up on all the sites I work on are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Both are free and both are easy and quick to initially set up (you might just need to drop your web developer a code if you don’t have access to your domain’s DNS).

Beyond this, the options are endless. Semrush is currently my go-to platform, however Sistrix also has some really cool data around visibility which can be very helpful during updates.

Google’s Looker Studio is also worth investigating. This pulls in data from different sources, including Google platforms (for free) as well as third-party platforms like Semrush, Ahrefs, social media accounts etc (you’ll need to pay for connectors for some of these platforms).

If you’ve not already got some sort of monitoring set up, then that needs to be on your to-do list for today. Like, right now! 😉

3. Resist the knee-jerk reaction

This is a significant update, which is expected to take up to a month to fully roll out. In that time, it’s likely the rankings will fluctuate (possibly a lot!), and website owners will get twitchy.

If you see your rankings start to drop, it’s really easy to panic and rush to change whatever you can get your hands on. Unless it’s really obvious there’s something you should do fast (like noindex low-quality, third-party content), this isn’t helpful.

A month is a long time, and the pressure can build if you’re seeing a negative impact on real-life customer orders and foot traffic. But as the system rolls out, your rankings may improve again – so if you act too soon, you may inadvertently change something that would have later had a positive effect.

It’s hard if you’re seeing a real-life negative impact on customer orders or footfall, but if you possibly can, sit on your hands and wait until you’ve got the full picture – and then you can make informed, thoughtful decisions about what to do next.

You can monitor when the update has finished rolling out via the Google Search Status Dashboard.

Don’t worry about continuing to create and publish planned content during the update period – just try to hold off on making significant changes to your existing site until you have a better idea what’s going on.

3. Read up on Google’s expectations

Going stir crazy waiting for the update to finish rolling out? Or just want to get ahead of the game once the roll out is complete? Then take a bit of time to make sure you’re up-to-date on Google’s recommendations for website owners, and start to audit how your site and content performs against these.

The key thread throughout all the recent updates is to create content that’s meant for people, not search engines. In this vein, you want to be considering the user intent of people searching for your target keywords, and whether your content meets these needs. None of this is new, but if it’s not something that you’ve looked at in a while, then take some time to refresh your understanding of what Google expects.

E-E-A-T has also played a big role in recent years. Look for opportunities to demonstrate your experience, expertise, authoritiveness and trustworthiness throughout your website.

As this core update also includes spam updates, it’s also worth having a quick brush up on Google’s spam policies and ensuring that your site doesn’t fall into any of these categories.

Remember – no action just yet, we’re just getting a sense of where any potential gaps or pitfalls could be.

4. Look at post-update reviews and industry data

Throughout the roll-out, and particularly once it’s completed, the internet will be awash with reports analysing which sites have gained or lost rankings and making educated guesses about why this might be. These sorts of insights generally guide popular SEO tactics in the coming months. There will be far too many to mention, but Sistrix usually publish a winners and losers report which is worth a read (here’s an example from August 2023’s update).

As well as looking at general guidelines, it’s worth digging in to see if you can find any data specific to your industry. This will highlight if there are any particular angles or issues that you’re more likely to see on your site. As an example, medical sites with content written by general writers saw a loss in visibility in earlier algorithm updates, which many have now retrieved by using medically-qualified content reviewers (and highlighting this on the page).

5. Analyse how your site has performed

Once the update’s fully rolled out, it’s time to analyse whether your site’s performing better, worse or has stayed largely stable. (Yes, I know you’ll have been peeking at the data the whole way through anyway!)

For the best insights, you should dig through the data on different levels: site-wide, subdirectory/subdomain level, and on an individual page level for key pages (or as a sample across the site).

From this, you can hopefully spot some patterns. Has your site been affected (positively or negatively) on a widespread basis? Or are any significant changes at an individual page level? This can give you some clues about what to try next.

For individual pages, it may be that the understood intent of the keyword has changed, or more weight has been given to something the competition are doing better than you.

For wider impacts, it’s worth checking that technical SEO basics are in place across the site, or whether there’s anything impacting a segment of your site which has seen bigger changes. It’s also worth getting an overall view of your content – both looking at the creation process (are you using a lot of AI or third-party content?), and whether there’s a high percentage of outdated, unhelpful or thin content which could be dragging your site down overall.

If you have Google Search Console set up, then you’ll get an email alert if your site’s been hit with a manual action – but you can also check this directly within your dashboard under the ‘security and manual actions’ tab.

6. Review search engine results for your target keywords

If your site’s performance has dipped on target keywords, an easy (but often overlooked) step is to see what the search engine results now look like for those keywords.

Are there new features which push all of the rankings down and could explain lost traffic? Which competitors are now performing better? Is there a common theme here? For example, has the expected format of content changed?

An SEO tool can also help uncover patterns within the rankings for a keyword. E.g. Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool will give an indication of the number of domains and backlinks going to each URL in the results, how many keywords the URL ranks for, as well as an estimate of how much organic traffic visits that page in a month.

If you can’t afford a subscription to a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, there are cheaper alternatives that will show similar data within Google results themselves. One that I’ve used is Keywords Everywhere, which will show Moz’s metric of Domain Authority (DA), the number of referring domains and links and a spam score. It also has some indications of search traffic and keywords (you’ll need to select the relevant country from the settings to see these).

This could uncover patterns like your competitors having more backlinks or a higher authority score, or their content being more in-depth (usually indicated by it including more keywords).

This can then identify tactics to try such as auditing a competitor’s backlinks and aiming to build similar links yourself, or broadening your content to better meet a user’s needs.

7. Test tactics on lower value pages

Once you’ve gone through all this information, you should have some good ideas for tactics you can try to test the impact on rankings.

If it’s possible, it’s safer to test these ideas out on lower value pages first. These could be pages that have low levels of traffic after the update anyway, or pages that aren’t a key revenue-making page (so avoid high-value product/service pages or any strong blogs that are a big driver of traffic to your site!).

8. Maintain a record of the changes you’ve made

SEO is a game of incremental improvements – so rather than one magical change that catapults your site into the spotlight, you’ll generally need to make a series of consistent changes to have an effect.

Because of the number of small changes involved, it’s important to keep track of what you’ve done. This will help you to align the changes with any impact on rankings and website performance, allowing you to replicate positive changes more widely across your site, and reverse negative changes.

This doesn’t have to be complex – straightforward options include a simple Google spreadsheet (accessible by everyone who works on the site), or adding notes or annotations to whichever SEO tool you’re using for monitoring.

9. Continue to monitor and review

As you continue to test, record and monitor your site, you should soon start to see some patterns of what’s helping. If you’ve not done so already, you can look at implementing positive changes across other areas of your website.

At this point, we’re back into ‘normal SEO’ territory – reviewing your website and the wider landscape for ideas, testing, monitoring and adapting.

Unfortunately, if you have been negatively affected by an algorithm update, it can take some time to recover. Google generally wants to see that efforts to fix the problem are sustained, rather than a way to game the system. It’s been suggested that you may need to wait for the next core update to fully reward your optimisations, but this is never guaranteed. So improvements may be small initially, but if you continue doing the right things then it can be possible to recover.

Moving forwards

As I mentioned at the start of this blog, Google is constantly rolling out new updates along with bigger core updates several times a year. There’s not always much notice before an algorithm update starts rolling out, but you can follow Google representatives online, or follow the Google Search Central blog to find out early about a new update and any actions Google’s recommending to take.

While some algorithm updates might not have a big impact on your site, it’s always useful to stay up to date with what’s being changed. Not only does that give you specific advice, but over the long term this information also acts as more general guidance of the content and experience that Google’s looking for from websites that it will promote in the search engine results. Nothing in this update so far is a surprise given the advice that Google’s been putting out for years – so staying ahead of this advice can help you make positive SEO changes to your website for the long run, rather than forcing you to scrabble for new tactics after each algorithm update!