March Core Update & Spam Updates: Four Major Trends

One of the most significant updates in Google’s history, the March Core Update, officially concluded on April 19, 2024, 45 days after its formal rollout. Google aimed to reduce low-quality, unhelpful content and certain types of spam, plus make updates to various systems as part of the dual March Core and March Spam updates. Additionally, Google indicated that the rollout of a new type of spam policy violation, “site reputation abuse,” launched after May 5, 2024.

These multi-part updates were long anticipated by many in the SEO and marketing communities for a variety of reasons:

• Many site owners facing significant traffic declines after the notorious September 2023 Helpful Content Update, plus other recent Google algorithm updates, were hopeful that the March Core Update would result in some reversals and increased traffic.

• There were a growing number of reports of spam, hacked content, and low-quality information infiltrating Google’s results, particularly tied to the proliferation of AI-generated content.

• In response to various complaints and feedback about the quality of its search results and opportunities to improve, Google indicated on multiple occasions that big changes were coming to address these problems.

Reddit is a major winner of SEO traffic and visibility

One of the most significant outcomes of the March Core Update, and the months leading up to it, was the rapid SEO visibility growth of Reddit in particular. This huge increase began in the fall of 2023 and was closely tied to Google’s announcement of its “Hidden Gems” update, aimed at increasing the visibility of forum and discussion content in the search results.

For many types of queries and categories — including health, financial, commercial, product review, adult, AI, celebrities, and other topics — Reddit has seen an enormous surge in organic traffic. Google also often shows multiple sitelinks for Reddit, so one organic result could link to up to 8 URLs within Reddit:

Google and Reddit also recently announced a partnership in which Google will pay Reddit $60 million annually for direct access to its API for training purposes. As part of this partnership, Google will “facilitate more content-forward displays of Reddit information,” which likely means more ‘Discussions and Forums’ SERP features appearing in search, although this was not confirmed by Google. Research by Tom Capper matches this assumption, as he found that Reddit results in discussions and forums SERP features increased from 0.1% to 1.3% year-over-year.

However, Google has stated that "Our agreement with Reddit absolutely did not include ranking its content higher on Search."

Regardless of the reason for the massive increases in organic visibility and traffic, the outcome is the same: Reddit has become a major SEO competitor to nearly every site on the internet.

According to Moz, Reddit’s biggest organic competitors are YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, with 34.2 million ranking keywords.

But Reddit’s surge in rankings across all types of content means many more sites are now competing with Reddit for visibility in search.

Drop in visibility for news and affiliate websites

While Reddit surged in new SEO visibility and traffic, another major category of sites saw a significant decline: thousands of informational sites — including many popular news and media websites — that monetize through display ads and affiliate links. These sites include news and publisher websites, product reviews, travel or recipe blogs, lyrics websites, entertainment and gaming news, rumors and reviews, and other types of informational content.

It’s important to note that correlation is not causation: the ads and the affiliate links are not the singular cause of SEO issues — but there appears to be a significant correlation between informational sites whose monetization strategy relies on display ads and/or affiliate links, and traffic drops stemming from the March Core Update.

The September 2023 Helpful Content Update also appears to have disproportionately impacted informational websites monetizing with affiliate links and ads.

The below chart shows the total aggregated SEO visibility changes — in terms of Sistrix Visibility Index numbers — resulting from the March Core Update. As you can see, the category labeled “News & Media” was the greatest overall loser, with a combined loss of -461 visibility points for all 151 domains in that category.

Google claims a 45% reduction in unhelpful content

At the start of the March Core and Spam updates, Google claimed it intended to reduce unhelpful content in search by 40%. After the conclusion of the March Core Update on April 19 (which Google announced seven days after the fact), Google then clarified that it had actually reduced unhelpful content by 45%.