Should You Be Worried About the March 2024 Google Core and Spam Updates?

On March 5th, Google announced the first Google Update of 2024, and it’s a doozy!

Not only is Google launching two updates at once – a Core and a Spam update – but it’s immediately shaken the SEO world.

There are a lot of people talking about this concretely, as if they know 100% what Google is doing and it’s impact, as well as how to recover from it. I’m not going to do that.

I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t tell you exactly what’s going to happen. It’s only been a few days since they launched this update, and already things have taken a turn I never expected.

So let’s go through the Google’s documentation on the update, what’s already happening, and what will happen (**based on projected dates from Google’s documentation, not my spitballing).

Side note: while I don’t have a crystal ball, it does appear that anytime I try to go on holiday and take proper time off, Google launches an update.

The HCU (Helpful Content Update) happened while I was taking a month off in September of 2023. This time, I tried to take a week to see my grandma and sort out some health stuff, and bam! Update.

Clearly Google thinks I shouldn’t go on holiday 🤣

My next one is in May, so get ready, y’all!

March 2024 Google Core Update

A Google Core Update is a pretty significant update. It means Google is making a change to its underlying algorithm that determines what ranks in the search results.

The main point of the update is to remove content that is written solely for SEO, and not to actually help users.

Before you freak out that SEO is dead, I let’s look at their exact wording: “showing less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful.”

Content can be SEO optimized, while still being useful to an audience.

This is “an evolution in how we identify the helpfulness of content.” So think of it as another element of the Helpful Content Update.

According to the document on the March update, and their FAQ page about it, here’s what you need to know:

• The helpful content system is an amalgamation of many signals and systems built into the core of Google
• Primarily works page-level, but there are some site-wide signals
• If you have high levels of unhelpful content on your site, it may be causing other content to not rank
• You don’t need to wait for another core update to fix a negative score necessarily, but they also don’t guarantee you don’t have to wait

This update is going to take 4 weeks to fully take effect, so we’ve got a bumpy March ahead of us.

They even say, “It’s likely there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update.”

As usual, I recommend not checking your analytics daily or you’ll just freak yourself out.

Interestingly, their post on the update uses the work “helpful” – in some form – 10 times, “people” 7 times, and “user” 5 times. Pretty clear what they’re focusing on, eh?

March 2024 Google Spam Update

Google Spam Updates are designed to identify sites doing spammy things to game search results rankings, and penalize them. These are basically all the activities that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines such as:

• keyword stuffing
• buying links
• malware
• phishing
• cloaking content so users and search engines see different things

Essentially, black hat SEO practices.

Some of these worked at one time or another, but they always violated Google’s rules.

This specific update is adding on 3 new spam policies to avoid:

1. Expired Domain Abuse: Buying an expired domain, creating crappy content on the URLs that once ranked on Google, and either directing links to their main site or using the high DA of the expired site to rank on Google with crappy content. It’s ok if you bought an expired domain. But if you’re using it to be manipulative, “steal” their old rankings with no helpful content, or steal their link juice with poor content, you’re a target for this one.
2. Scaled Content Abuse: When many pages (we’re talking MANYYYYYY pages) are created to rank for more keywords, not to help the user. This is typically done with programmatic SEO to create answers to every query that feasibly exists on a topic but the posts are surface level, and have no unique helpful answers in that content. They don’t care whether it’s AI or human-written.
3. Site Reputation Abuse: When posts/pages are created for third-parties. This is a parasite SEO tactic where people buy a post on a well known blog, like Outlook India. It has a high DA, so it ranks well. Then they put affiliate links in it, and they get that income. It can also be done for sponsored content, advertising, and other partnerships. Essentially, the content is thin, irrelevant to the site itself, and would look weird to their users if they actually found it on the site. We’re talking about this at scale. One post on your site that’s a bit tangential will have nothing to do with this.

99% of us aren’t doing any of these things.

Writing for topical authority is not the same as scaled content. Publishing 10 posts in a day is still not scaled content. Using an AI writer properly (aka to assist in your content creation, not to do it for you) does not make you spam.

You can buy an expired domain and be totally fine.

You can have third party content on your site – think an affiliate round up page of all your faves linked, or a “coupon page” (it’s the example Google gives). That’s fine as long as it’s relevant!

But if I, from She Knows SEO, started having random pages popping up about casinos, baby formula, or air filters, it’d be weird, right? Y’all would be like “what is Nina on about??” That’s what some of these big publishers are doing, and it’s what Google is targeting.

The May Ultimatum

Interestingly, Google has given these publishers until May 5th to remove any content that could be site reputation abuse:

They don’t say to take it down, just to block it from Google Search by May 5, 2024.

So essentially, sites have 2 months to no index this content, or their rankings are in jeopardy.

It’s intriguing that Google would give them time to do this, when Google never gives us normo publishers a warning.

Manual Actions

If your content is found to violate the spam policies, you’ll get a Manual Action.

This is when a Google reviewer (a human being, not the algorithm) finds a violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines on a website.

These can occur for any violation of Google’s rules. But with this update, they are happening for content flagged related to the spam update.

They look like this:

The description of the penalty for the spam update reads: “Detected Issues: Pure Spam. Description: Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generate gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s spam policies for web search. Learn More [a clickable link]. Affects: Affects all pages.”

When I first saw a screenshot of the penalties, I thought someone had doctored the “generated gibberish” line. But nope, that’s Google’s actual wording!

Manual penalties can be appealed or even lifted, although at the time of writing this post, I have not seen anyone successfully do so with penalties during this update.

The process can take weeks, but we are seeing people get their appeals denied within minutes which is interesting.

I’m not sure if Google is just too busy to handle them right now with the update going on, if they’ve determined sites couldn’t have fixed the issues fast enough, or if Google has no intention of reversing these penalties.

Only time will tell.

The Twitter Drama

If you’re not on SEO twitter, congratulations on saving hours of your day.

I love it, but I also have a lot of time to kill so let me run you through the drama currently happening around this update so you don’t need to doom scroll as much as I do.

Now, this drama is not unfounded. I use that term because I can’t think of a better one except “news”, but it’s not really news.

Anyway, here’s what’s happened on Twitter:

1. Indexsy Got Clapped

In his words, Jacky Chou “got clapped”.

Google gave a manual action to every site inside one of his Google Search Console accounts.

You can watch Jacky’s full rundown of what happened and his thoughts in his Youtube video here.

Now, Jacky has been pretty vocal about his more black hat methods of doing SEO, so it’s not quite as much of a surprise as some others we’re going to talk about.

But still, to hit 10 sites on one Google Search Console account all at once in such a short time frame is something I’ve never heard of before.

2. Niche Site Lady Got 4 Penalties

Unfortunately for Niche Site Lady, Google gave 4 manual penalties (2 on top of the 2 she cited in the tweet I screenshotted earlier in this post).

Just 8 minutes after her first tweet, she added this one:

Niche Site Lady recently had issues around a manual action for spammy linking based on a guest post she had written years ago for a site that later became spammy.

The two seem unrelated.

But like Jacky’s manual action, Niche Site Lady had it hit multiple sites in the same Google Search Console account.

She maintains that one of these sites had human edited AI, but the others didn’t.

But she had recently shared a pure AI site she’s been building as an experiment two days earlier, which was also hit with this penalty.

3. Ian Nuttall’s Master Sheet of Manual Actions

Ian Nuttall, owner of Niche Site Metrics, found 837 sites in their database that were de-indexed by the March 2024 updates.

You can read his full article on it here and find the data he’s freely sharing for yourself.

But here are the Cliff’s notes:

• 837 sites were de-indexed (that means Google stopping indexing them when they had previously indexed them), that’s 1.7% of the sites in the Niche Site Metrics database
• Over 20.7 million organic pageviews wiped because of this
• He estimates they lost almost half a million dollars in display ad revenue

I haven’t gone through every site on this list (I’m a data and SEO nerd, but I do have somewhat of a life!), but you can if you’re so inclined. He’s made it freely available – no email signups or anything.

The issue of sites being de-indexed is prevalent for sites at any DA, PA, or traffic level. It’s totally unclear if this is a glitch or a permanent change.

I suspect for most, especially for the smaller publishers, that it’s just a blip as Google is sorting itself out.

And I wouldn’t worry until it’s been at least a week of this occurring – although since the core update will take a month, we may need to wait longer.

Panicking and doing something weird to your blog to try to “undo” something that may not even have fully happened is a great way to break your site long term.

Be patient.

I know that sucks to hear.

Write new content you know is helpful. And leave your damn Search Console alone for! It’ll just cause unnecessary stress.

4. Are Case Study Sites Being Targeted?

There’s a lot of reasons not to build in public. I heavily regret not hiding my main site better before going public with teaching SEO.

It’s been targeted by spammy backlink attacks, been ripped off by journalists who spin the content for larger sites (legit just changing one sentence in the intro, but my DMCA takedowns do nothing), and of course opening me up to people mining my keywords hoping for a quick win. The latter I don’t mind if people actually create better content than I did, but the former two suck.

Now there’s a new reason not to build in public: Google seems to be giving manual actions to site owners building in public.

HEAVY ASTERISK** but these are people are are typically repping what I would call spammy content.

It could be helpful, but the tidbits they share on Twitter and Youtube certainly make it seem like they’re just doing Scaled Content Abuse with ChatGPT. And even spam link building – again, with ChatGPT.

I’m just saying what it seems like from the thumbnails of the videos. I haven’t watched them enough to be able to make a full analysis.

Julian Goldie and Jessie Cunningham both got a manual action and had their site de-indexed.

I’m not worried about my build in public at the moment, as I’ve been going for a more traditional approach and just working on the content myself. It’s got some AI assistance, but honestly I think that content is better than the stuff I hired beginner writers for early in that whole debacle (you can get the full run down on my mistakes where writers are concerned here).

And I’ve since fixed up that content during the content audit of my build in public episode 2.

Still, there is a chance it could get hit. I’m not impervious to Google, nor is anyone else unfortunately.

5. Reddit and Quora Got Hit

…kinda.

Sorry, that was a bit click baity but they have seem a significant traffic drop!

Lily Ray shared screenshots showing a decrease in the visibility index for both Reddit and Quora.

Reddit has seen a minor decrease (from 900 to avoid 800 on the Sistrix graph she shared). But Quora dropped from 400 to 300 – yes, it’s still just 100, but that’s a 25% decrease.

Is the core update finally starting to realize people don’t want 2016 Reddit responses to misinform them about their question?? Maybe!

Here are the tweets:

6. Mediavine Panic

Now this isn’t technically about the update, but it’s heavily related to issues the spam update is targeting so I think it’s prudent to include it.

Fatstacks, aka. John Dykstra, sent a newsletter last week about the drama currently unfolding in the Mediavine Facebook group.

Now I can’t verify this as Mediavine is very strict about removing all non-active publishers so the second I switched to Raptive I got the boot.

I’m going to heavily paraphrase here, but essentially he said that some publishers wanted to be able to tell Mediavine when sites on their network were low quality, kind of like you can do with Google’s “feedback” feature for sites in the search results (not that it’s clear that Google ever listens to it).

He rightfully called it “posse vigilantism”, which I fully agree with.

Mediavine had to create this open letter to their creators expressing their position. It boils down to this: they already do and will continue to assess sites on their network for spammy AI content done at scale with no value to real people.

And anyone who is caught doing this will be removed from the network.

They don’t clarify what they determine as low quality, but based on their requirements to apply, it can be assumed that they mean content that is not original, isn’t long form, and perhaps is just AI spun gibberish, to steal Google’s term.

They’re ok with AI content as long as publishers use it responsibly (although interestingly they call alt text “alt tags” … which don’t exist. It’s just alt text).

Unless you’ve turned your site into spammy garbage (which you’d know about), you’re likely ok.

7. Travel Lemming is Down Over 65%

Travel Lemming’s Nate Hake has been vocal on Twitter about issues with Google since the Helpful Content Update (or maybe earlier, but that’s when I found them).

They were especially upset over new travel widgets that have pissed off most of our niche community. These summarize what we’d have in our listicles, pulling pictures by the creators they’ve now pushed down on the page without explicit permission.

And unfortunately, Travel Lemming has not escaped these updates. Nate shared a traffic screenshot on Twitter showing a steep decline with over 65% of the site’s Google clicks dropping off.

Many SEOs and travel bloggers are noting in the comments that they thought, based on Google’s documentation, that this site would have been unscathed, if not rewarded.

Unfortunately that’s not the case, and seems to be further proof thus far that Google is hitting sites intensely without Manual Actions (a sign that this is from the core update).

Nate is vocally anti-AI, uses original photos, and hires locals to write the content on the site. I’m not the most familiar with it, but I’ve seen it around before and I’d say it’s a solid travel site with good content. I don’t think it’s perfect, but no site is.

8. But Some Are Rebounding

I don’t share any of this to say we have guarantees of these sites being lost for good.

We’ve seen Google glitches recently, slower reports for GSC, and even some bounce backs for people on Twitter.

I’m thinking of it like a game of pong right now, where the traffic might hit zero but then ping back up again.

We cannot say for sure that any of these sites are 100% dead in the water or that they can’t be recovered.

I checked out some of the sites I know of, even for the people I mentioned above who lost traffic (no, I won’t share them publicly unless that person chooses to. Consent matters y’all), and I can still find them when I search keywords I knew they ranked for before.

I’ll share my notes on my sites next, because I know doom and gloom is scary. And honestly we can’t be sure it’s doom and gloom time quite yet (beyond the spam update. Those Manual Actions are legit).

Looking for some rebound stories? I can verify any of these but here are some I found on Twitter:

• Eliav Lankri
• Carl Broadbent

How My Sites Are Faring

If you don’t know, I have 4 blogs after selling my mocktail site last year.

Travel Blog

At the time of writing this – on Sunday March 10 – I’ve got some good news and some bad.

My main site is starting to fall. I suspect it’s going to have the same plummet my peers on Twitter are having and will crash to zero.

I don’t know if it’ll stay there, but I’d rather expect the worst right now.

I’ve got complicated feelings about it.

Is it the best site in the world? No.

Am I sad this happened? Yes.

Do I kinda feel like it’s undeserved? …maybe?

I’ve basically abandoned it since this time last year when I was too busy working on She Knows SEO, making my courses as helpful as possible, and trying not to give into my mental breakdown too much.

The whole site is about living abroad, and my plans to live abroad fell through the night before. That didn’t help me want to write about living abroad.

So I left it with some beginner writers and my editor (who I left half trained and then fucked off int othe forest for months), who did an ok job at the time. But reading the content now, some of it does sound like AI gibberish.

Just last week I found some more glaring errors in the content and structure.

But I didn’t have the energy or drive to fix it while visiting my grandma, so I left it.

My stomach dropped when I saw the decline, but when I step back and look at it, I made a lot of mistakes on the site last year.

The biggest one was not managing it hands on the way I should have, while I was trying to be a fun boss and not have my mental health completely crumble (oops, didn’t quite succeed there). I didn’t know how to train anyone, yet I hired 40 writers because it’s what I thought I “should” be doing to be successful. And then I just abandoned them with a bunch of keywords and a spreadsheet to submit them.

I’ve mentioned my mistakes to my students often, but I realized I haven’t shared them as publicly so I feel like I need to come clean on my mess ups.

I also got shiny object syndrome like 100 times since the Helpful Content Update. Everyone is diversifying traffic and I wanted to try every method, so I half-assed a bunch of different things. I started a Facebook Page, Facebook group, restarted my Pinterest, tried the whole Reddit thing for about 20 minutes before I got bored, and tried Discover/Web Stories. I also created content for all of those things that are definitely not the best for SEO – so I added more fuel to the gibberish fire that way.

The content was helpful and not AI, but still I suspect it didn’t help – and since I was barely working on the other platforms, none did very much for me. Pinterest is doing the most at about 1,400 clicks a month, which is more than I expected from my lack of work on it.

I failed the site and that is 100% on me. I was far too focused on She Knows SEO last year because it’s what was fun for me, and it’s what I was actually doing at the time, where I wasn’t living abroad.

The content that is good and helpful is definitely getting drowned by these issues, the lack of a full on content audit, and some other mistakes I made while running case studies.

The students got all the details on that recently. Oh how I regret using my biggest site as a testing ground! Definitely should have used the starter sites I set up for that purpose, but c’est la vie.

I don’t know if this will stick or not. So I’m not doing anything for it right now. I’m just letting it be and seeing what comes of it after the updates. Then I’ll decide my next moves.

She Knows SEO

SKS is doing as good as ever. Totally steady traffic lines on GSC which is nice. It’s my steadiest site of the bunch and rarely has those peaks and valleys other sites do.

I haven’t posted new content recently and I’ve only done a couple minor updates when I told myself I’d do a giant audit.

I think it’ll do even better once I get to those. 

I honestly think SKS is my best site.

I know everyone gets upset with people who only blog about blogging and don’t have other sites. So I kept my other ones, but I didn’t fully care about them, nor did I put in the effort they needed. I just didn’t have the capacity mentally or physically.

And they kept trucking along regardless, even when I knew I was cutting corners and not practicing what I preach – and why I was applying properly to SKS.

Ottawa Things To Do (My Build in Public Project)

My Ottawa niche site – at time of writing – is continuing as normal. *knock on wood*

It’s the only site I’ve audited fully in the last couple years, and I write all the content myself which I definitely think helps.

The site did have some AI content that was spun nonsense that I did early on just to get more than 5 posts on the site. But I completely redid them in January, and they’re definitely helpful now.

I can’t guarantee it won’t get hit, but I would be the second most surprised, after She Knows SEO.

Pet Site

A pet site I largely let those beginner writers practice on is, justifiably, seeing a dip as well.

It’s just the start, so it might just be a low day or two. But I wouldn’t be very surprised if it does flat line too.

The site has some good content I created buried in some generic articles I assigned and, again, left to its own devices. These articles were largely assigned in the first couple months I had the writers, back when I still thought training should be piecemeal and every article would “unlock” the next phase – but the phases were as small as “intros”. So sure intros look good, but the rest is a problem.

It is 100% on me that my writers didn’t have the training and skills needed for this, that I didn’t assign the keywords in a proper way (I just let them pick from a list of like 200 willy nilly), and I didn’t provide enough experience to add to the content.

So the content sounds a bit like AI gibberish for the articles I didn’t write (this was my passion project until April, so everything else I wrote by hand sans AI), and looks like it’s just targeting random low volume “easy” keywords.

Does She Really Know SEO Then?

Here’s the thing: you can know the “right” way to do SEO and get lazy.

Or get busy.

Or make mistakes.

Or, like me, be a broken human being who can barely get through the day so you don’t work on the site at all.

Yeah, I haven’t been doing well in 2024. Got some bad diagnosis news that I’ve been struggling with.

I’m not a good manager either, so I struggle to delegate or have other people run the show.

So things got messed up.

The one site I did work on has done the best in the last year, and is definitely the most helpful of the bunch.

Just because you know the right way to do things, doesn’t mean you always do them, unfortunately.

I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to be more careful, to not do things just because I saw other people doing them and thought that meant they were a success strategy, to step back and take better care of myself.

But what’s done is done. We can only move forward.

What Should You Do Now?

I have no idea.

Because we don’t know all the details yet.

I’m writing this post to help people understand Google’s documentation, not to make claims on exactly what’s happening, to moralize or judge any sites getting hit, or to guarantee anything.

We just don’t know yet.

I expect it’ll be the end of March before we can really say with any certainty what exactly is going on with this update.

In the meantime, if you’ve been exceptionally spammy, be worried.

If you haven’t been, kick back and relax a bit.

Yes, good sites can still get caught in the crossfire, but then there’s nothing you can do until we know what this update was all about so we can know exactly what to fix.

Right now, focus on creating quality content for your audience. Use EEAT signals (I don’t care if you think they’re made up, they’re good for the user). Stop listening to the 100 Youtube videos that have cropped up in the last 5 days about this update that claim they have the solution. If you have time, add a secondary traffic source. And just do your best.

Everything I noted in this post may be entirely reversed next week. That’s how updates go! We just need to ride the wave until it settles. Then we can analyze our form.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns about this update, you can post them in my free Facebook group. Be sure to answer the questions or it’ll auto-reject your request to join.

I did a more step-by-step explanation of the updates and what they’re looking at on March 6th for my Profitable Part-Time Blogger students. If you’re interested in checking out the video, you’ll want to join the Profitable Part-Time Blogger here.

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