Big Changes and Rank Volatility: Part 1 of the State of Organic Search 2024
Change within how Google search operates isn’t a new phenomenon. The search engine makes literally hundreds of changes a year. Most of them are fairly minor, go unnoticed, and don’t come with an official announcement or explanation by Google. But some Google updates are much larger and can significantly impact users and businesses.
We’re halfway through 2024, and we’ve had very two significant changes within the Google search landscape that marketers should be aware of and consider adjusting to. Interestingly (but probably not surprisingly), both major changes directly responded to the rise and attention to generative AI and LLM tools.
In this three-part series, we’ll be taking a look at the March 2024 core update, the expansion of AI Overview and their new Gemini language model, and how businesses need to be thinking about content and organic search rankings for continued success.
What was the March 2024 Core Update?
On March 5th, 2024, Google announced and released their latest core update. Core updates usually happen several times a year, and they include what Google considers “significant broad changes to [their] search algorithms and systems.” Google usually makes announcements about their core updates and tracks incidents, reviewed, spam, and core updates in a search status dashboard.
In their March 2024 update announcement, Google described this update as complex but summarized it as designed to “improve the quality of Search by showing less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful.” Although they didn’t clarify the specifics of the algorithm changes, they did give pretty critical insights by explaining that this core update corresponds with new spam policies and a spam update that occurred at the same time.
Spam Clarifications and Adjustments
Google’s new spam policies added (or arguably clarified/emphasized) ways websites can violate Google policies and be considered spam:
Expired domain abuse: using expired domains (e.g., previous government domains, medical charity domains, school domains) to manipulate search rankings for new content/sites unrelated or poorly related to the previous domains.
Scaled content abuse: creating large amounts of unoriginal content of little to no value, no matter how it’s created. This section of the policy specifically calls out generative AI, scrapping feeds, and stitching/combining content.
Site reputation abuse: Publishing third-party pages with little or no first-party involvement to manipulate search rankings using first-party site’s ranking signals. This includes sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages.
In their core update announcement, Google focuses on adjustments to address large volumes of content, content that lacks oversight, low-quality content, and most importantly… content intended to manipulate search rankings.
Although they rest much of their justification on this particular principle: “manipulating search rankings,” it still seems a vague line of reasoning given the amount of marketing focus on SEO for B2C and B2B websites. The difference is a fine line on how much you’re trying to provide quality content for human users in your attempts to improve your search rankings.
What Impact Have We Seen After the Update?
It's taken a few months for search experts to be able to identify the impact of the March 2024 core update.
Google warned everyone that this rollout might take a while, and it did. Which meant that rank change volatility lasted a long time. Frequently core updates see a week or maybe two of pretty big changes. This rollout lasted 45 days, and showed large rank volatility throughout.
On average, the very top of the top in search results stayed steady. If URLs were ranking in the top 5 positions before rollout, chances are those URLs stayed within the top 5 results. But that didn’t hold true for URLs below that, and this particular update really impacted URLs sitting in positions 6-10.
According to Sistrix Visibility Index, there were a few really big winners in terms of visibility increases: Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Quora, and dictionary.com.
According to Sistrix Visibility Index, there were a few surprising domains that saw decently large drops: Wikipedia, Cambridge, NYTimes, IMDB, Indeed, and LinkedIn.
Websites with outdated content and web pages that had links or content deemed not relevant to the overall domain and topics were hit hard.
Google says that they effectively removed 45% of unhelpful results from their SERP. It’s hard to verify or analyze that claim, and there have been multiple reports about significant negative impacts on content that seem high quality and relevant to users.
Anecdotally, traffic to our customers’ websites did not see significant fluctuations in terms of visits and engagement. Traffic remained steady with small, normal upward trends. The biggest difference that we’ve seen in terms of SEO changes has been in terms of impressions and click through rate (CTR). Impressions started dropping dramatically in early Q2 of 2024 while visits remained steady/good, which gave significantly better CTRs. There does seem to have been some impact on dropping inappropriate and off topic keywords, which I, as an SEO specialist and analyst, appreciate.
Overall, this has been considered a pretty big shakeup, and was just the beginning for changes in 2024. Stay tuned for the second part of this series: AI Overview and Gemini language model.