Google releasing massive search quality enhancements in March 2024 core update and multiple spam updates

Google is unleashing multiple measures aimed at improving the quality of its search results beginning today. Google is releasing the March 2024 core update and a number of spam updates (aka March 2024 spam update). Also, Google’s helpful content system has been incorporated into its overall core ranking system.
In addition, Google announced several new and updated spam policies that it will begin enforcing through automated algorithms and manual actions.
March 2024 core update – bigger than before Today, Google started to roll out its first core update of the year and its first algorithm update of the year – the March 2024 core update. Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product, Search at Google, told Search Engine Land that the update will help reduce unhelpful content in Google Search by 40%. “We expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%,” Tucker wrote. The rollout of the March 2024 core update may take as long as a month. Multiple systems will be updated and released during the update. This update, unlike some previous core updates, includes enhancements to several components of the overall core system. This March core update will have multiple updates within it, since this update touched on several systems within the core update, Google will push out updates to those systems over the coming weeks. The March 2024 core update is “more complex update than our usual core updates,” Chris Nelson from the Search Quality team at Google said. Google made “changes to multiple core systems,” he added. Google enhanced its core ranking systems to show more helpful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches (more on that later). In fact, since Google is updating multiple core systems, “there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update, as different systems get fully updated and reinforce each other,” Nelson added. Google said this update has refined how it understands which webpages are “unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people.” This “could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries,” Google added.