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Everything We Know About Google’s March 2024 Spam Update

By Joe Youngblood

On Tuesday March 5th, 2024 Google released an update to their spam systems referred to as a Spam Update. This update takes aim at 3 specific types of web spam and Google estimates that in conjunction with a Core Update it will eliminate 40% of spam currently in their index. This update is running in parallel with a Google Search Core Update which includes an upgraded Helpful Content classifier, read about the March 2024 Core Update here.

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

March 2024 Spam Update Vitals

  • Date Started: March 5th, 2024
  • Date Completed: March 20th, 2024
  • First Impact Reported: 9:51 am (Central time) March 6th, 2024. An X/Twitter user reported a ‘friends’ entire website appeared as deindexed in Google Search Console with a manual spam action: https://twitter.com/ratneshkumar684/status/1765404890736808062
  • Most Impacted Industry(ies): Unknown
  • Most Impacted Site(s): Unknown
  • Most Impacted Website Types: Unknown
  • Most Impacted Content Types: Unknown
  • SEO Change Proven to Improve: Unknown

First major impact reported: Starting around 9am to 10am Central USA time reports on the social media website “X” (formerly Twitter) began pouring in that AI content sites were getting nuked with full-site manual action penalties. Most of these sites had a ton of made up content one of the funniest examples we’ve seen so far being and article targeted to “How old is Taylor Swift’s Daughter?” that explained how old her daughter is, but she does not have any children.

After 10am the volume of reports started escalating as SEOs began reviewing SERPs they keep a close eye on and seeing AI content sites disappearing completely. At a little under 24-hours since the announcement, this was an aggressive and sudden impact that many real content sites are likely thankful for.

Google’s New Spam Systems

This update takes clear, deliberate, aim at 3 specific types of web spam often employed by seedier businesses and overseas spam operations. These can also be sold frequently as legitimate SEO tactics and may negatively impact businesses who were unaware of their potential downsides.

1. Scaled Content Abuse

Google defines this tactic as “using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings”

You can interpret that as “Using generative AI tools to create large volumes of content with no editorial input or oversight with the only goal being to achieve higher rankings to earn revenue”.

If you’re reading this, you probably have seen at least one or two examples of this in the past. Like the “world’s first AI-powered SEO Heist”.

Google couldn’t be any more clear here, this type of SEO tactic in their opinion is clearly blackhat and they are building systems to find and demote it.

What is odd is that for this type of spam and another Google appears to be dedicated to determining the intention of the website creating the content. Here’s a FAQ from one of their documents (linked under the ‘Resources’ heading below).

What’s different from the old policy against “automatically-generated content” and the updated policy against “scaled abuse”?

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.

That means you MIGHT be able to get way with creating generative AI content at scale, if it does not appear to be with the intent of abusing Google’s rankings but instead to help users.

2. Site Reputation Abuse

Also known as “Parasite SEO” this tactic seeks to find a ‘high authority’ or in Google’s words ‘strong reputation’ website that allows UGC and using that site to add ‘low quality content’ that then ultimately ranks highly in Google based on the host websites reputation.

Weirdly, Google will not be going after this type of content immediately. Instead they are giving the UGC sites a 2-month heads up to update how they police their content: “We’ll now consider very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam. We’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5, to give site owners time to make any needed changes.”

It is important to note that Google will not consider all third-party content on a bigger website as abusive. In one of their documents they included this FAQ:

My site has a coupon area that we produce in part by working with a third party. Is this considered spam?

Many publications host coupons for their readers. If the publication is actively involved in the production of the coupon area, there’s no need to block this content from Google Search. Readers should clearly understand how the publication sources its coupons and how it works to ensure that the coupons provide value to readers.

It would appear that as long as the content is useful and clear to the users who provides the content, that these types of arrangements will be ok with this new spam detection system.

3. Expired Domain Abuse

Google claimed 8-years ago to nullify the value of expired domains, but apparently that all changed at some point and spammers discovered they could use old domains to build spammy websites on again. Instead of nullifying all values, Google’s system will now determine the intention of the purchase and new content and if that intention is primarily for rankings the new site will be considered spam: “Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content are now considered spam”.

Google’s March 2024 Spam Update Resources

Transparency Report

We add this section when a Google Spam 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.

Since we do not condone spam here we assume none of our clients or only those who recently onboarded from other SEO operations will be impacted by this update.

Google March 2024 Spam Update Help

Here are a few tips to help you if you happen to get hit by this update or are curious on what workarounds might be.

  1. If you allow UGC or have third-party content on your site consider noindexing that content until an editor reviews it. This would require a human system or an advanced system to scan and review the content but it could help you allow long-form content that might rank and bring in more traffic while weeding out the low quality content. Systems that lock all content behind a login have nothing to worry about here. This has been a problem since the start of UGC (it pretty much never seems to impact YouTube though).
  2. If your domain was previously owned there’s a chance you will lose some SEO value such as PageRank values here soon. Google might also erroneously consider your website as spam. For example lets say you purchase the domain “SuperSmiles.com” and create a blog about home dental care but it was previously a dental clinic in Denver, Google might ding your blog for abuse under their new rules. Uncertain how you might avoid or recover from this aside from switching domains.
  3. If you are producing content at scale with generative AI tools it is imperative that you have humans rewrite the content OR at the very least edit it. Systems like WriteAI are designed to have built-in editing and teamwork features as well as an AI-powered rewriter so you can quickly rewrite content and get it to your publishing systems. Create a workflow that includes your genAI solution as a starting draft and how it should be reviewed and edited prior to publication. It may not hurt to include this data publicly too acknowledging AI’s role in preparing a rough draft and the humans who cleaned it up and edited it.
  4. The most obvious answer here is to not pursue spammy tactics. Of course the definition of spammy changes with the ebbs and flows of the web and what might be called spam today was a killer new tactic a few months ago. Its important to know if your tactics are currently or might soon be considered spam to a search engine so you can prepare for the short-term payoff and potential long-term pain such tactics might be accompanied by. If you knowingly leveraged one of these spammy tactics, it might be time to find a way to do more legitimate types of SEO.
  5. Of course the best advice is to partner with a talented and intelligent SEO agency to help you identify problems and find solutions to fix them.

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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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