March 2024 Google Core and Spam Updates: What They Mean for the Future of SEO

Staying informed helps you stay competitive amidst big algorithm changes

Clearscope's Bernard Huang hosted industry-leading SEO educators and experts Barry Schwartz, Ethan Smith, and Aleyda Solis.

The group tackled recent developments in SEO, including the March 2024 Google Spam and Core Updates... which are producing big changes in search engine results pages (SERPs).

March 2024 Google updates and SGE: Top takeaways from this session

1. Don’t panic. The panelists agree: If your site hasn’t been impacted negatively, keep doing what’s working for you and best serves your target audience. Focus on what will move the needle of your business.

2. CTRs may or may not be significantly impacted. It depends. Ethan Smith predicts that SGE will be an evolution of Google’s current Answer Box (or featured snippets), which doesn’t show up for all queries. He also predicts highly transactional or commercial searches will be less disrupted, although there is a good debate amongst the panelists and audience about CTR.

3. Play in Google’s sandbox. Aleyda Solis recommends testing SGE yourself (via Search Labs, if you haven’t tried it already) to know how it’s currently operating for searches in your niche. Go through your own sample of queries that are the most important terms for your company across your target user’s search or buying journey.

4. Make content that really does satisfy user intent. Barry Schwartz shares that SEO isn’t just a checklist. It’s more challenging than that. And make sure Google "isn’t embarrassed by ranking your website" (offer a good user-experience, reduce spammy ads, create excellent content that satisfies search intent).

Watch the full webinar

About the experts

Barry Schwartz

Barry is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on advanced SEM topics.

Find Barry on LinkedIn or Twitter/X.

Ethan Smith

Ethan Smith is passionate about SEO because it has the potential to transform the quality of content we consume every day. He is the CEO of Graphite, a premier SEO and growth marketing agency. He has advised companies like TCV, MasterClass, Honey, Upwork, Notion, Webflow, Ticketmaster, Neiman Marcus, Thumbtack, and BetterUp. Ethan is also an adjunct professor at IE Business School.

Find Ethan on LinkedIn or Twitter/X.

Aleyda Solis

Aleyda Solis is an SEO consultant and founder of Orainti—a boutique SEO consultancy advising top brands worldwide—and a speaker and author. She shares the latest news and resources in SEO in the SEOFOMO newsletter and digital marketing in MarketingFOMO, organizes the SEOFOMO Meetup series, hosts the SEOFOMO Chat Forum, provides SEO tips in the Crawling Mondays video series, and a free SEO Learning Roadmap called LearningSEO.io.

Find Aleyda on LinkedIn or Twitter/X.