Anyone with a website has probably noticed that something’s going on with Google in the past month or so. A major update happened, and only the best will prevail. In fact, many low-quality websites are already not as visible as they once were, with some actually deindexed.
Now, everyone in the digital marketing world is talking about the importance of this update and the changes to the industry that it will bring. Let’s go through five of the most important things that you should know about the Google March 2024 update and see if there are moves you can make to avoid penalties.
Some Sites Are Getting Completely Deindexed
Some people have it worse than others. Yes, your site may have lost a couple of spots on the first page of Google, but other marketers have lost all of their progress. Imagine finding your website completely gone from the SERPs, out of nowhere. Well, with the new update, certain websites got deindexed, removing them from Google.
Google’s goal for the new update is to reduce the amount of unoriginal, irrelevant content that isn’t helpful to the audience and remove it from search results. In fact, Google aims to remove up to 40% of websites they consider low quality and that produce useless information or low-value user experiences. Or, to be blunt, they aim to remove websites whose sole purpose is to rank by matching specific keywords and search queries.
And, after the update went public, we’ve seen that plenty of these sites did disappear. So, Google’s doing something right.
No Mercy Penalties Hit Hard and Fast
No matter how big your website may be, it might be looking at some penalties from the most recent Google update. If there’s something we’ve already learned, it’s that no website is above getting penalized, so we’ve seen sites with millions of conversions go down to only a few hundred within weeks.
And, not only are the penalties hard, they hit pretty quickly as well, without much time to react. Since this is an algorithmic update, you will not be notified, no matter if your site is heavily impacted by the changes. If you’re interested in learning how your website was impacted by the recent changes, type “site:website.com” into Google and see if your website shows up in the search results.
Surviving Previous Updates Doesn’t Help With This One
Don’t think that just because one of your older sites survived the previous updates, it will remain untouched by this one, too. In fact, we’ve seen users complaining about sites they worked on for years with no issues get hit pretty hard by this update.
Though some people are praising Google for removing spam and low-quality content, others aren’t satisfied because they believe their progress was ruined without much cause. However, even if a site didn’t use AI to produce its content, without deep topical knowledge, it probably wouldn’t pass the test of the most recent update.
Even The Small Sites Matter
No matter how big your site is, if you didn’t work on it correctly, Google decided to penalize you for it. In fact, some pretty small websites, with only a few pages of content got punished for using AI to produce the text on their pages.
With others, whose AI content isn’t that easily detectable, experts believe that the amount of content was the problem. For example, posting many articles per day simply to abuse the console is one of the simplest ways to get deindexed these days.
No Room for Errors and Slacking
The websites that come with errors, typos, and content written by AI are among the primary targets of these websites. So, if you have an older site you haven’t worked on for a while, it might be gone. Having multiple errors is one of the easiest ways to get deindexed, and if you forgot to clean up your site before the update, that’s likely what happened to it.
Conclusion – Stick to Quality!
Once it’s all said and done, we all come to the same conclusion. Google wants what it always wanted: high-quality websites at the top of the SERP. To get there, it had to remove everything that resembled spamming, AI, keyword stuffing, and so on.
In the future, fill your site with the best human-written content you can get in your niche. Present yourself as a topical authority to Google, answer the questions your audience is asking, and give the people what they want, and you won’t have any issues.
If you have trouble writing the content that does that, look for outside help. Content Lab can help you produce the content that will keep you or get you to the top of the SERPs!
Vujadin Lulic