Google Core Updates: What They Are and What to Do When One Hits

A core update is a broad revision to how Google judges pages. It is not a penalty, nothing has been done to you specifically, and the practical question is only ever what to do next.

A correction to what this page used to say

This page previously carried a headline claiming that up to forty percent of websites could be affected or removed. That was wrong, and it is worth correcting plainly rather than quietly.

What Google actually said about the March 2024 core update is that the changes, combined with previous work, were expected to reduce low-quality and unoriginal content in search results by about forty percent. Google later reported the realised figure as around forty five percent.

Those are different claims. A reduction in the amount of low-quality content appearing in results is not the same as a proportion of websites being removed. The first is about what fills the results pages. The second would be about sites disappearing, and Google did not say it.

We have left the page at its original address because the address is what carries any history, and changed the content to be accurate. That is our correction policy: fix the page rather than delete it.

What a core update actually does

It revises the systems that decide which pages best answer a query. Because the judgement changes, positions shift, and a page that has not changed at all can move up or down.

• It is not a punishment. There is nothing to appeal and no message explaining it.

• It is not about a single factor. Chasing one thing after an update is almost always wasted effort.

• It affects relative position. If you dropped, somebody else was judged a better answer than you for that query.

Google's guidance alongside the March 2024 update also introduced spam policies covering expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. Scaled content abuse in particular describes generating large numbers of pages primarily to manipulate rankings, which is worth knowing now that generating pages is nearly free.

What to do if your traffic dropped

1. Wait until the rollout is finished. These take weeks, and positions move throughout. Reacting mid-rollout means reacting to a state that has not settled.

2. Confirm it is actually the update. Check for a technical cause first: pages accidentally blocked, a broken redirect, a site problem, or seasonality. A surprising share of suspected update damage is something else.

3. Find out what specifically dropped. In Search Console, compare periods and identify which pages and which queries lost. A site-wide decline and a decline on one section are different problems.

4. Read the affected pages as a stranger would. Do they answer the question, quickly, better than the pages now above you? This is uncomfortable and it is the actual work.

5. Improve rather than delete. Deleting a page removes any chance of recovery. Improving it keeps the address and the history.

6. Expect recovery to be slow. Positions often do not return until a later update, which can be months away.

What not to do

• Do not make many changes at once. You will not know which one helped or hurt.

• Do not buy links in response. It is the fastest way to turn a ranking drop into a real problem.

• Do not republish everything with a new date. Changing a date is not an update.

• Do not panic-delete pages. The instinct is strong and it is usually wrong.

If the drop followed a site rebuild rather than an update, the cause is more likely to be in the redesign mistakes that destroy search rankings.

What to do between core updates is a different question, and it is covered in our guide to ongoing SEO.

If your traffic dropped and you want help working out whether it was an update or something you can fix today, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.