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Everything We Know About Google’s March 2024 Core Update

By Joe Youngblood

On Tuesday March 5th, 2024 Google released the first Core Update of 2024 also known as a “Broad Core Update”. This is the first major announced search algorithm update according to Google this year. Bundled in this Core Update is a big change to the Helpful Content Update. The Core Update is also running parallel with a new spam update called the March 2024 Spam Update that Google claims will eliminate 40% of spam in search results.

While Google Core Updates in general take approximately 14-20 days to roll out, Google has gone on record as saying they expect this update to take about a full month. Your website or content could see a “hit”, improvement, or wild fluctuations at any point during this update.

“The March 2024 core update is a more complex update than our usual core updates, involving changes to multiple core systems. It also marks an evolution in how we identify the helpfulness of content.” – Google

Google’s verbiage around this core update has changed significantly from previous versions. In the past Google would say “There is nothing you can do to improve your site after this update” but now they are giving more insights into what marketers might be able to do to improve their site if it was hit during this update.

Much of the media is conflating this update and the March 2024 Spam update, but Google appears to be treating them differently. Below we will briefly discuss the Spam Update, however, for most of this document we are going to cover the Core Update and the inclusion of the Helpful Content Update in this document.

Here is everything we know about the Google Search March 2024 Core Update

March 2024 Core Update Vitals

  • Date Started: March 5th, 2024
  • Date Completed: April 19th, 2024
  • First Impact Reported: Unknown
  • Most Impacted Industry(ies): Small publishers
  • Most Impacted Site(s): Unknown
  • Most Impacted Website Types: Programmatic SEO, low “authority” publisher sites
  • Most Impacted Content Types: Unknown
  • SEO Change Proven to Improve: De-optimize pages by removing some SEO elements or adjusting them

First major impact reported: HouseFresh – the air purifier review website was wiped off the face of Google by the update. They wrote about their experience and strategy moving forward here: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

March 2024 Core Update Facts

  • First announced update, first major update, and first Core Update of 2024.
  • Released after complaints about Reddit, Quora, and other UGC sites appearing at the top of search results.
  • Includes a major update to the Helpful Content classification system.
  • Update is NOT site-specific, same as all other known Core Updates.
  • This core update may take up to 2 weeks to fully roll out and impact websites.
  • Not all websites or documents will get a ranking increase or decrease from this update.

Helpful Content Classification Updates

The Helpful Content classifier is a potentially site-wide signal first introduced in August of 2022 in the first ever Helpful Content Update. The original description of this classification system was one system that evaluated if a page/document was helpful for humans or not and marked it either helpful or unhelpful. Helpful content would get a “boost” in search rankings while content considered “unhelpful” would get demoted. The system potential forms a site-wide signal when all of these calculations are added up and if a site has a lot of unhelpful content, then other content on the site might suffer too even if it is helpful.

What has changed:

  • There is no longer a single system that classifies content as helpful – Google made this clear saying that the helpful content classifier had ‘evolved’ and now used multiple systems: “There’s no longer one signal or system used to do this”
  • There appears to no longer be Helpful Content Updates (HCUs) – the classification now appears to be considered a “core” system and so will update / refresh during Core Updates like the one running now.

Other than those 2 points, the underlying system appears to be much the same. Content deemed “helpful” by Google will rise through the rankings and content deemed “unhelpful” will plummet.

Google is also still not going to provide sites with examples of helpful or unhelpful content on their website via Google Search Console and continue to ask SEOs, marketers, and content creators to “self-assess” their content using a variety of mostly vague questions provided by Google (see “‘Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content’ by Google” under the Resources heading below).

Spam Updates

Running parallel to this Core Update is a spam system update that seeks to identify and remove the following types of content:

  • Expired domain abuse

    • – Buying a dropped domain and building a new site on it (or rebuilding the old site)

  • Scaled content abuse

    • – Generating large volumes of content at scale for the sole purpose of ranking higher in search engines.

  • Site reputation abuse (i.e. “Parasite SEO”)

    • – Using a major site to build a presence on in order to abuse their reputation for higher rankings such as spamming on Reddit, Quora, or LinkedIn.

Google’s March 2024 Core Update Resources

Media Coverage of Google’s March 2024 Core Update

Transparency Report

We add this section when an update may have impacted our clients or our portfolio of websites. Below you’ll find positive and negative impacts to client websites / our websites if those impacts were deemed statistically significant AND if we believe we understand one or more of the reasons behind the adjustment.

We had a large ecommerce client hit during this update, but specifically just one page on their website and one keyword. Our belief is that this update was not the cause and our experiments to reverse the lost rankings appear to be bearing fruit with the average rank climbing nearly every week. We also believe this update helped a key competitor of thiers who is constantly creating unrelated content in order to send out to media for links, making their website heads and shoulders more valuable in terms of inbound linking signals.

Google March 2024 Core Update Help

Because there’s a lot going on here, your negative impacts may have been caused by multiple factors. Here are some tips on building your way to recovery:

  1. An easy thing to notice quickly might be “junk” content on your site. We identify this as thin pages, pages you never really intended to be in search, or pages with no real purpose for an end user. For obvious reasons these pages might be identified as “unhelpful” and could be causing a site-wide drag on your rankings. Noindex them and see if this helps.
  2. If you built your website on a domain that was formerly another website, expect any old links and other possible SEO values to be zeroed out by Google at the very least. While they claim they’ve already been doing this for about 8-years it seems clear with this announcement they were not. Focus on link building or developing a reputation through high-quality content production to replace this lost value.
  3. Consider a Google Ads PPC campaign to help fill in your lost traffic / revenue. Or, if you’re annoyed with Google over this consider running ads on Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Microsoft Advertising (Bing, Netflix, DuckDuckGo), OTT ads like Hulu or Vimeo or Vibe, OOH ads like digital billboards on Blip, or other sources of paid traffic like OutBrain, StackAdapt, Decibel Ads, and AdRoll.
  4. Check to make sure your content is indexed in Google Search Console. Frequently we see content removed from the index during or around the time of a big update like this. That content can not rank because it is not indexed and that means signals associate with that document such as PageRank are also not passed on throughout the site.
  5. Check Google Analytics (or more realistically Google Search Console since GA4 is impossible to use) to see what content lost traffic from the period prior to the update to the period following the update. Review that content and ask yourself the questions in Google’s self-assessment criteria (linked above under the Resources heading). If you find any issues here fix them.
  6. Look at your internal linking and make sure all important documents are internally linked well. A trick here is to ignore your navigational links as it appears Google might sometimes also be ignoring them for distribution of PageRank purposes. Instead look at how you internally link to your post important pages via your content and related pages.
  7. Consider a new link building campaign and/or pursue ongoing link building in perpetuum. One overlooked aspect of Core Updates is that they could quite possibly redefine the values being sent to your site via links from other websites. If those values go down as they might through things like the Fade Out Effect, then your site will also lose values. For example if a page on a news website that links to your website had a PageRank of 7 when it was linked from the homepage, but two years on it is now buried deep in the news site and the PageRank has dropped to 2 then the outbound value to your after Google divides down the value would be far less than it was two years ago. Google no longer publicly updates PageRank scores (TBPR) but does still use that metric in ranking calculations. Here we see it is better to continue to gain new inbound links rather than to wait for the old ones to lose value and harm your rankings. Quality inbound links to documents that lose traffic in this update might also help those documents recover more quickly.
  8. Compare your document(s) that lost traffic to the top ranking document for the main keyword. Ask yourself, “What did they do that is really good and how can I do that but better?”
  9. Hire a skilled SEO consulting agency to help you find what needs to be fixed, get it fixed, and get your lost rankings and traffic back. We have decades of experience in SEO and have helped numerous businesses recover from Core Updates.

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Joe Youngblood

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Joe Youngblood is a top Dallas SEO, Digital Marketer, and Marketing Theorist. When he's not working with clients or writing about marketing he spends time supporting local non-profits and taking his dogs to various parks.

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