March 2024 core update: dates, what changed and what to do

What Google changed#

Google announced the March 2024 core update on 5 March 2024 as an update designed to show “less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful.” In its Search Central post, Google called it “a more complex update than our usual core updates, involving changes to multiple core systems.”

The most significant change was how helpfulness is judged. Google wrote that it had “enhanced our core ranking systems to show more helpful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches” and that “there’s no longer one signal or system used to do this.” Helpfulness stopped being a separate system with its own announced updates and became part of core ranking.

When it rolled out#

The Google Search Status Dashboard logged the release on 5 March 2024 at 09:02 PST with the note that “the rollout may take up to a month to complete.” It took longer: Google posted on 26 April 2024 that “the rollout was complete as of April 19, 2024,” a total of 45 days. At launch Google warned there would likely be “more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update, as different systems get fully updated and reinforce each other.”

The same day, Google launched the separate March 2024 spam update and announced three new spam policies: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. A ranking change in March 2024 may come from either update, so check both date ranges before drawing conclusions.

What is known about its impact#

Google did not publish site-level impact figures in its Search Central post. Its own framing is that core updates “don’t target specific sites or individual web pages,” and that pages which move down “aren’t necessarily bad”; other pages may simply serve the searcher better. Treat any percentage you see attributed to this update as a third-party estimate, and check its method.

What site owners should do#

Google’s post said “there’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people,” and pointed sites that lost rankings to its guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content. Google’s standing core update guidance adds the practical steps:

• Wait until the rollout has finished, then at least one more full week.
• Compare the week after with a week before the update began, not with the rollout window.
• A small drop (position 2 to 4) needs no drastic action; a large, sustained drop warrants a site-wide self-assessment against Google’s helpful content questions.
• Avoid quick fixes. Improve content in ways that help readers; delete content only as a last resort.
• Recovery can take months and may not show until a later core update.

How to check whether it affected you#

In Search Console, set the Performance report to a date range spanning February to May 2024 and compare clicks for the week before 5 March with the week starting 26 April. Look at Web, Image, Video and News search types separately, as Google recommends. The Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists every confirmed update with its dates, so you can rule out overlapping rollouts before attributing a change to this one.

Related updates#

• The November 2023 core update was the core update before it.
• The August 2024 core update was the next one.