There have been Google March 2024 core and spam changes for a little over a week now. It’s pretty sure that they have been busy. Since then, we’ve seen changes in search ranks. Some of these changes are due to changes in Google’s algorithms. And some of them are because the company changed its spam policy by hand.

Still Not Done

It’s very important to stress that there will be more improvements in the future. Google says that the full rollout of the core update will take about one month. During that time, many systems will be changed. It will also take about two weeks for the spam update to go live. The update has only been live for a week. So, more changes to the rankings will likely happen in the search results in the coming weeks.

When This Changes Are Coming?

Here is a quick list of the changes that have happened in the past week:

• The March 2024 core and spam fixes from Google came out on March 5.
• On March 6th and 7th, Google removed several websites from Google Search because they had been manually removed for breaking spam rules.
• On March 8 and 9, we may have seen the first signs that the core and spam update was changing site rankings.
• As of March 10 and 11, it was easy for Google to be up a bit, but some accounts said that websites that were affected by both the manual work and the changes to the algorithm had some changes reversed (at least for a short time).

Confusing and Overlapping Updates

When they made so many changes at once in Google Search, it can take time to keep track of what is changing what. The Core Web Vitals change, a human action, a spam update, and a core update are all happening today. It’s possible that both site owners and SEOs will not understand what happens when changes happen at the same time.

In reality, Google is not following through on its stated goal of reducing the number of changes that happen simultaneously. Danny Sullivan, who is in charge of Google Search Liaison, said in 2021 that they try not to make the same changes more than once. He said it again in 2022: “We’ve worked very hard to keep updates separate from each other, or with as little overlap as possible, to help creators understand more.”

“We do generally try to avoid this, but we had both the core update and the spam update ready, and ultimately, we’re going to push updates we think will improve the quality of search results,” he said about the latest update. An update is not the same as doing things by hand. There is no program that changes the spam rules, so those aren’t “updates” that “overlap” with core updates and spam updates.

Why Do we need to worry?

Because we write about it, we might like getting these updates every day. But it can be very stressful for SEOs and site owners. The best thing to do is to wait and see how things settle down after these changes.

You can keep following Google’s advice to make your website better for users and improve the quality of the content until then. It is always a good idea to remember it.

Check back often to see how each of these updates to Google’s search engines is going.

Need help related to this update, please contact our digital marketing agency and we’ll help you.