Industry News

It was a busy week between Google releasing the Google March 2024 core update, which is supposed to be one of the largest core updates Google has ever released. Google also released a March 2024 spam update. Google updates a number of its spam policies while dishing out tons of manual actions...

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said again that the search company "generally try to avoid" overlapping algorithmic updates. This is after Google released both the March 2024 core update and March 2024 spam update the same day.

Google is testing a button in the search results under the top stories news results to see "more news topics." I personally cannot replicate this, which makes me think this is new.

Google Ads now limits the number of country-level exclusions you can add to your ads to 120 countries. This is a new limit but Google confirmed that location exclusions aren't going away.

Remember People Cards? Probably not. It launched in Google Search in India in 2020 a way for "business professional, performer, or anyone looking to build up your own online presence, you might have a website, social profiles, and other information spread across many sites," Google said. Well, it is being discontinued as of April 7, 2024.

Google has updated its Google Business Profile help documentation to add a line saying that Google may show your social media posts in Search if you have associated your social media links via your Google Business Profile.

Google Business Profiles has outages for some of its business management tools. The outages started yesterday, March 7th, at about 5 pm ET or earlier. It impacts the ability to manage reviews, appeals and also to check your verification status.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google has unleashed tons of manual actions, search ranking penalties you can see within Google Search Console, after it released its search spam policy updates on Tuesday. The manual actions seemed to mostly have been distributed yesterday, Wednesday, March 6th, a day after Google announced the new spam policy changes.

I ran a poll asking my X/Twitter followers if they think the new Google March core and spam updates will reduce unhelpful content from showing up in the search results by 40%? About 80% of the 1,XXX votes said no, they don't think it will reduce the low-quality, unhelpful content from showing up in the Google search results.