Google Launches The March 2023 Core Update

The new algorithmic update just released by Google is called the March 2023 Core Update. There has been a lot of news on the Search front this semester, and therefore it will be really important to keep track of the coming changes: in the meantime, let’s look at the information we can count on at the moment!

The March 2023 Core Update Starts

“Today we released the March 2023 Core Update, which will take about 2 weeks for the full launch”: this is the concise official communication from Google, published both on the relevant updates page and on social channels. As usual, SEOs interpret these words as a signal to “fasten your seat belts” because the SERPs and rankings are about to change in the wake of the algorithmic changes that Google has decided to implement.

What Google’s Major Updates Mean

The broad core updates or major updates, we know, are the interventions designed to carry on the mission of Google, which can be summarized in the expression “offer useful and reliable results to users who carry out searches.” Toward the finish of a work of examination, testing, and critical assessment on the nature of the outcomes (which is likewise founded on crafted by the quality raters, although it doesn’t straightforwardly influence the positioning), Google causes changes to the way its frameworks to assess the items in the complex. 

Because of these changes, a few pages not recently evaluated as exceptionally as they merited in query items might get a lift to the top. Interestingly, beforehand strategically situated pages might lose permeability. This is not a penalty for those who are demoted because there is nothing wrong with the work performed and the content published: there are simply some pages that, in the light of the new evaluations introduced by the update, offer better content, deemed to be of higher quality and more useful for users. 

It is also for this reason that it is important to know when Google updates its search ranking algorithms, to have a time reference in analyzing the performance of our site and check if the pages have had positive or negative variations in terms of ranking – while also keeping an eye on our SERP Observatory tool to monitor the impact of the update in quantitative terms.

The Previous Updates And The Latest News From Google

As mentioned at the beginning, the March 2023 Core Update arrives 6 months after the previous main update, the September 2022 Core Update (for the record, it is not a record distance between two broad core updates, which still belongs to the May 2020 couple and December 2020 with 213 days, albeit during the pandemic), but certainly the editing and testing activity on the SERPs has not stood still in this period. 

Just as a quick mention, in fact, in the last six months, we have dealt with the release of the Product Reviews System at an international level and then various minor interventions against spam; most importantly, though, was the worldwide rollout of the Helpful Content System and the update of theSearch Quality Raters Guidelines.

Unequivocally these last two mediations were especially fascinating for the people who work in Search promoting because they presented the idea of “valuable substance” (a definition that adds to the now symbolic recipe “quality substance” in recognizing the deciding attributes for Google) and added the And of involvement to the EEAT worldview, an undeniably fundamental reference for Web optimization. 

And then, we must not forget the other enormous novelty that has also plunged into the world of research, namely the diffusion of Artificial Intelligence systems applied to the creation of content, which has driven Google to explain its situation for the algorithmic assessment of such composed texts from simulated intelligence authoritatively. So much meat to cook, therefore, that the March update could/should transform into ranking changes in the light of the new requirements, making a simple correlational hypothesis.

The Curious Case Of The Disappearance Of Youtube From Google: An Advance Update?

Speaking of coincidences, then, let’s note another curious event. On March 14 – the day before the update was officially announced – Barry Schwartz had reported the “disappearance” of the YouTube homepage from the search results of Google USA: in practice, the query [ youtube ] in Search did not lead to the YouTube homepage as usual.

But the SERP returned results from Wikipedia, the YouTube Android app on Google Play, the iOS app on Apple.com, the blog of YouTube and others, but not youtube. com. In contrast, the homepage query led to the desired homepage, and thus the “problem” was with classification and not indexing. One of the comments to the article said that this situation “occurs with the release of core updates, which will be announced when the impact is a little larger, within a day or two.” 

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