---
title: 'Google Strikes Back: Spam Doesn''t Stand a Chance! (March 2024 Google Algorithm Update)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=PlkbKgS6jUQ'
video_id: 'PlkbKgS6jUQ'
date: 2026-07-29
duration_sec: 1199
---

# Google Strikes Back: Spam Doesn't Stand a Chance! (March 2024 Google Algorithm Update)

> Source: [Google Strikes Back: Spam Doesn't Stand a Chance! (March 2024 Google Algorithm Update)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=PlkbKgS6jUQ)

## Summary

Google's March 2024 core and spam updates aim to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content and expand spam policies to include scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse. The speaker interprets these changes as signals to produce more helpful, original content rather than gaming the system. The rollout may take up to a month, with significant impact expected on search results.

### Key Points

- **Google Announces Major Updates** [00:03] — Google rolled out a core update and spam update starting March 5, 2024, with the core update taking up to a month and the spam update two weeks.
- **Google's Transparency Signals** [01:01] — Google published a blog post detailing the changes, which is unusual. When Google gives advance notice, it typically wants creators to proactively adjust their strategies.
- **Targeting Low-Quality and Unoriginal Content** [02:43] — The update aims to reduce low-quality, unoriginal results by 40% by refining the helpful content algorithm to better distinguish helpful from unhelpful pages.
- **Sites Matching Specific Search Queries** [05:58] — Google warns against sites created primarily to match very specific search queries, but emphasizes relevance remains key. The issue is hyper-focused, non-natural content.
- **Scaled Content Abuse** [10:07] — Google is strengthening policies against mass-produced, low-quality content, whether human or AI generated. It's about quality, not scale alone.
- **Site Reputation Abuse** [13:53] — High-authority sites hosting low-quality third-party content (e.g., guest posts) will be considered spam. This targets sites like Forbes and CNBC that sell guest posts.
- **Expired Domain Abuse** [16:29] — Buying expired domains to leverage old authority for low-quality content is now considered spam. Authentic authority should be built from scratch.

### Conclusion

Google is doubling down on rewarding original, helpful content and penalizing manipulative practices. The update signals a long-term trend, and creators should focus on adding genuine value through personal experience and expertise.

## Transcript

break and then Google decided to push out a huge core update and tell us that everything in search is changing so I spent some time reviewing what Google about this that I've got to share with you but here's the deal it's going down
hopefully not your web traffic um just this uh big update that started yesterday so if you're watching this when I publish it this um started going out yesterday a core update and a Spam update so first of all let's look at
what Google's reporting they're showing right here uh for 2024 the March 2024 spam update and core update both starting March 5th the core update says it could take up to a month to finish rolling out and uh the spam update over
the next two weeks but there's a lot going on here this isn't like a lot of core updates where we just we have no idea Google doesn't give us any direction in fact Google published this blog post that talks a little bit about
what they're trying to do with this specific update and with another one that's coming probably in about may now that alone the fact that Google's telling us about it tells us something already whenever Google gives us a heads
up about what they're trying to do right now or especially what they're trying to do in the future and usually it's because they want us to proactively start moving in that direction and not wait for the algorithm update and for us
to start correcting our Behavior okay uh we saw this with core web vitals Google told us way in advance that they were going to start using these core web vitals and that those were going to become um actual ranking factors and so
focusing on how to make sure their sites meet the specific criteria Google was searching for with their core web vitals things wouldn't shift around a whole bunch we worked really hard ahead of
time and in the end how much of an impact did core web vitals have on search very little I'm not saying that Google's not actually really doing anything here they probably are but usually they tell us because they want
us to change our Behavior whereas with a lot of updates they don't tell us exactly what they're trying to change or even give us a lot of explanation as to what they're going for I think in large part because they they don't want us to
making good content in this case they're like you need to make better content and you better get started doing it quick because as of right now certain things that were maybe considered acceptable and we doing really well are now being
officially labeled as spam specifically so that Google can start taking quote so that Google can start taking quote targeted action against such content let's dive into this in a little bit more detail okay high level here they're
trying to they say they're trying to improve the quality of the ranking as we've seen for the last several months the quality of the sys is pretty questionable especially varying from from query to query but we're seeing a
lot of content that isn't very good which is ironic because that was all part of the helpful content stuff this is still helpful content but like I've been saying actually for a few months now I don't think Google feels like
where we're at today with the serps is where they want to be and that they're going to continue to move toward this direction that I'm not surprised they're moving in and I think it's actually a good thing if you're not just trying to
game the system and you're actually creating good content which is what we've been promoting since we started the first thing that Google covers is reducing low quality unoriginal results now you can read this blog post I will
link to it in the description in a pinned comment below but I want to do a interpretation I've been doing this for a long time and I think that it's easy to take some of the wrong things away from this so I'm
giving you my predictions I can't in any way say for certainty what is actually going to happen as a result of this update anybody who thinks they know update anybody who thinks they know exactly what's changing already is
either a narcissist or a liar so um I'm sorry it's just how it is so that's my disclaimer for you these are my predictions all right so lowquality unoriginal results way back in 2022 they started tuning their ranking systems to
get rid of unhelpful content or at least to suppress it in the serps and we've already seen this starting to happen I used to get like seven blog posts for a thing and chances are they were all
was the original one and that one might have been ranking number seven or might have been number 40 in the serps not even ranking anywhere near the top that's already been reduced dramatically where Google's just trying to pick out
the most original one and put it there well now they're just further refining that helpful content algorithm to hopefully better fine-tune that's what they say trying to fine-tune and better understand if web pages are really
helpful if you look at the Quality Rader guidelines Google uses you learn a ton about what it is that Google's trying to work toward right any particular web page should serve a purpose there should be a main purpose that every blog post
every page on your website and if that page meets its intended purpose then it's helpful if you have content that is supposed to answer a question but doesn't really do it that's not helpful and Google is hopefully they think at
least doing a better job of being able to distinguish that now this next sentence is one that I think raised alarm bells for a few people and I want to spend just a minute on it says this could include sites created primarily to
match very specific specific search queries one of the things that I've personally taught for years is that when you write content we should first think about is there a search query that someone is actually likely to search
doesn't do any good to just write about the things you want to write about if they don't match any real searches that's why we do keyword research the whole concept of keyword research or as we call our process search analysis is
to try to figure out the things that people are looking for and to create content that answers those questions so is that now a problem aren't we supposed to help people and answer their questions isn't relevance literally the
number one ranking Factor how relevant your content is for the question your content is for the question somebody asked yes it still is notice the wording here this could include sites created primarily to match very
specific search queries here what I'm thinking about is sites that literally thinking about is sites that literally are just keyword stuffing like crazy we see sites where they're going for exact match domain literally like writing
either a question or an answer to the question as the domain of their website and the whole website is very geared toward answering a handful of very very specific search queries that's not really a natural
content creation process and so I think it's important that we pause and do take a step back and make sure that we're not going down that rabbit hole of literally just like I'm just going to answer very specific narrow questions usually though
when I write a blog post it's answering several questions and we see that show the kinds of queries that those blog posts rank for and when I write those blog posts the words kind of for me at least they kind of flow out in a way
that feels very natural kind of conversational and it's really like the way that I would approach helping my friend or my neighbor or a family member same types of questions if Google is trying to Target that I don't know what
don't know what the whole point of a search engine is if it's not to help you find answers to your questions so don't worry so much and think that oh yep Google Google's going to Target Niche websites because they answer people's
questions no that's not it at all but just don't get so hyperfocused on only answering very specific questions that your content isn't actually helpful they say that this latest update that's going out right now in addition to all of the
two years related to helpful content they're going to be reducing unhelpful content that shows up by about 40% it's a lot of blog posts that aren't getting traffic anymore but it's also a lot of really crummy content not getting
traffic anymore whether or not this update makes a huge shift in the content we see in the serp specifically regarding helpful and unhelpful content I think that it's an important indicator of what Google's working towards
which means that we can't continue to write duplicates of content that's already out there you have to add something every time that you write a blog post you should be thinking about what is it that I can add to the
internet something that's not quite there that doesn't mean it has to be totally 100% original everything that we know is based off of some experience that we've had and usually some knowledge we gained from somebody else
nothing's going to be 100% original but what is it that you can do with that topic or that search query that you're trying to answer that you're trying to respond to what can you do with that to make your content a little more helpful
a little more original is there a way that you could gather some additional that you could gather some additional data or just use your own experience if you actually live your Niche to some level you're going to have personal
experience that you can bring to bear that's going to make your content unique the web all right now that was the first piece the second piece is about trying to keep more spam content out of the search results they're actually really
broadening their definition of spam and again this is where they said uh this targeted action thing these updates allow us to take more targeted action under our spam policies that should raise an alarm Bell if Google wants to
content you don't want to be that content trust me and they're telling us so that we stop making this kind of content so first of all scaled content abuse they're using the word abuse again that's should raise some alarm bells in
your head they say they've long had a policy against generating like this autogenerated really low quality content uh there's a lot of content on the web like this where it's like literally you have a data set and based on that data
set it uh generates a thousand pages on your website that each one is more like your website that each one is more like a directory listing than really a post and it's often times not very helpful that's probably like one of the more
easy to understand versions of like autogenerated content in today's world though there's a lot of AI generated content that's able to take that a step further and I don't think Google cares if it's AI that generates the content or
if it's AI that generates the content or not but autogenerating content at Large Scale without paying any attention to the quality of that content is what that exactly here they say today scaled
sophisticated and that makes it really unclear if that content was created automatically or not so they say they're strengthening their policy what does say they're strengthening their policy to focus more on this abusive Behavior
the abusive Behavior being generating massive amounts of autogenerated content um or at least whether it's even all autogenerated I don't even think Matters by just creating mass amounts of content in an attempt to game the algorithm in
fact that's what they say I keep getting ahead of them uh producing content at scale to boost search ranking we've talked about this to some degree and I think it's easy to conflate that a little bit with topical authority
meaning we want to create topical Authority by exhausting our topic pretty well right so when we come up with a topic that we want to write about and you know within our overall industry our overall Niche the overall topic of
our website right and then within there there's going to be a bunch of subtopics a bunch of different places where we could create a whole cluster of content around just this one aspect of the topic that's I think still going to be a
good thing the point here though is to create really helpful content within that we shouldn't just be writing 30 blog posts in a cluster and just generating that super fast not worrying about the quality just making sure that
answers all the questions around that little topic and then move on to the next one and end up with thousands of blog posts in the matter of 6 months Google can tell that that's not really a natural form of content creation and so
somehow Google says that they're strengthening their policy to be able to better identify maybe they actually don't say that they're going to be better at identifying this but when they find it they're strengthening their
policy so that they're able to take that targeted action against such websites targeted action against such websites and they say whether automation humans or a combination are involved it doesn't matter if you generate 2,000 blog posts
quality of the content isn't good and you're just trying to make sure you exhaust all the search queries or all the keywords of that topic you got to write good stuff otherwise Google just doesn't want to show it all right next
site reputation abuse I actually am pretty excited about this one I love the read it here for you but then we'll have a little bit of discussion about it sometimes websites that have their own great content may also host lowquality
content provided by Third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting s's strong reputation I am currently going to call out basically every news site on the internet as well as a lot of other just very large authoritative
sites in most Industries where they have just established a ton of authority over time so everybody wants a backlink from those guys right so what do they do they write a guest post editorial and it does
standards of the rest of the website the accuracy of the content is abysmal and it just sucks to read we see this all the time and then what do they do they go to their website and they say this uh website was featured featured on Forbes
and CNBC and MSNBC and all these other news sites and all these other reputable websites in their industry or just reputable across news so they cover like all Industries Google's saying that that's spam and they're going to start
taking targeted action so how much do you think all of these different organizations are going to start paying more attention to uh the kind of content websites I think it's going to be a lot harder to get a guest post on any of
their websites without making sure that you meet strict quality guidelines we've never put a lot of effort into those T types of PR campaigns because to me it especially because most of the content basically is fake I don't know how much
they're charging to post a guest post but I'm sure they're making some little side income and news organizations are I think um hurting for money in a lot of willing to do that but it's gotten to the point where when I see as featured
on and then they list out a whole bunch of different big websites to me that means basically nothing I'd rather be cited as a source as an authority like like I think literally like the hor approach is probably going to be more
useful than this because if someone's citing you as an authority for like an actual news piece then that's a real vote in your favor but just having an article that sucks written on one of these websites says nothing about you
and now Google's going to start treating it like the spam that it is all right moving on to the next one expired domain abuse this is the last one that Google specifically pointed out who knows what other things they're going to kind of
mix in and consider as spam content now but this is one that's been talked about a lot in this industry and I've never gotten on board with it and that is purchasing of expired domains to try to sort of get a head start on SEO now I
get it I understand why people want to do it and I'm not totally like anti but realistically like my website should eventually end up with real Authority
Real credibility based upon the work that we do not based upon what somebody did in the past or based upon a bunch of links I was able to buy like on its own Merit my stuff should be able to be authoritative and I should be able to be
authoritative by participating in the industry in a normal natural way when you buy an expired domain you're basically trying to take any credibility that a previous website had that used your domain and sort of use that as a
starting point now it's only a starting point the quality of the content you publish is ultimately what's going to dictate the level of authority you land at but a lot of people have been getting a head start and avoiding what we
typically call the Google sandbox well Google's saying that you know what and repurposed with the primary intention of boosting search ranking of low quality and unoriginal content this can mislead users into thinking the new
content is part of the older site which may not be the case or in the case of like the entire approach to that people take to expired domains in this industry old site it's intended typically to be a
new website that's just leeching off the authority that the previous website had well this is now considered spam does that mean that whenever I buy a domain I need to make sure that it's never been used before no I don't think so I think
if you're publishing high quality content on your new website it doesn't you're going to take any of these approaches that a lot of people in our industry are taking to publish large amounts of crummy content and now you're
doing it on expired domain like these are all huge red flags for Google and frankly I don't mind that they're considering all this spam I think this actually works out really well for any of you that have been creating websites
to create them all along so like I said in the beginning this update it's going the next 2 to four weeks you're going to be seeing a lot of changes probably happening in the serps you may see some fluctuations in traffic hopefully as
this is going down your traffic's not going down and is actually going up we'll see um and as things roll out we'll do our best to try to keep you updated on what we're seeing and like always I encourage you to learn your
industry get involved and be able to actually speak from your own experience to make it so much easier and make your content so much more original so much more helpful so much more unique and that really is what Google's been after
for years and they're just going to keep getting better at it so even if this update isn't the one that completely puts the nail in the coffin for crap content it's coming and it's just going to keep getting