Google’s March 2024 spam fix rollout is now complete. The incident began at 09:03 on 2024-03-05 and ended at 07:09 on 2024-03-20 (all times are US/Pacific).
Fresh Spam Policies: As previously discussed, Google has unveiled three additional spam policies to enhance user experience and combat online misconduct:
- Scaled content abuse: Aiming to stop mass publishing content spam
- Expired domain abuse: Aiming to stop people from repurposing expired domains for SEO benefit
- Site reputation abuse: Aiming to stop reputable websites from manipulating the search engines by having a portion of their site publishing Parasite SEO articles
According to Originality AI, during the March Content Update, Google manually deindexed around 2% of webpages. Study 1, which examined 79,000 websites, discovered that 1,446 required manual intervention. Meanwhile, Study 2 investigated the prevalence of AI-generated content on these penalized websites, discovering that all featured AI-generated postings, with half constituting an astonishing 90%-100% of AI-generated content.
Originality.AI’s findings present a vivid picture of the aftermath. As part of its research, Originality AI examined many websites based on the company delivering the advertising, including:
- MediaVine: 21,808
- Raptive: 6,428
- Ezoic: 51,293
When a site violates Google’s criteria, it may face a “manual action,” which could result in its removal from search results, also known as deindexing.
Glenn Gabe thoroughly investigated the visibility metrics of 1,000 websites that were deindexed owing to deliberate spam manual activities. The findings are astounding, with no indications of recovery seen at any of the facilities on the list.
Google’s core update is still rolling out. Perhaps we need to wait for the update to be completely completed before making a general assessment.
