A core update, new spam policies, and INP

Google started a core update on Tuesday, March 5, 2024, and published three new spam policies the same day. On March 12 a new Core Web Vital replaces the old one. That is a lot of movement inside a week, and almost none of it requires you to touch your site in a hurry.

Here is what shipped, which parts reach a local business, and the two things worth your afternoon.

What Google shipped on March 5

This is not the usual ranking refresh. Google says the March 2024 core update involves changes to multiple core systems rather than one adjustment, that it is more complex than a normal core update, and that it may take up to a month to finish rolling out. The stated aim is to show less mass-produced, unhelpful content.

Three new spam policies arrived alongside it:

• Scaled content abuse. Producing a lot of pages mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help anyone, whether a person wrote them, a tool wrote them, or both did. That last part is the real change. The test is volume plus no original value, not who or what typed it.
• Expired domain abuse. Buying a domain that used to belong to something else and filling it with unrelated content to borrow whatever reputation was left in it.
• Site reputation abuse. Third-party content published on a strong domain mostly to ride that domain’s ranking ability. Google has said enforcement on this one begins on May 5, 2024, which makes it the only item in the batch that comes with notice.

As of March 11, 2024, the first two are already in force.

Which of these reach a local business

Most local sites are doing none of this. A few are, usually without the owner knowing, because somebody sold it to them as a package.

1. City pages generated in bulk. Two hundred variations of “service in city” where the only difference between them is the city name and a line in the intro. This was the standard cheap local SEO product for years and it is what the scaled content policy describes.
2. Service pages shipped straight out of a writing tool. The policy does not care that a machine wrote it. It cares whether the page exists to help a reader. A generated draft that a person actually edited, fact-checked and added photos to is a page. A hundred of them published untouched is a pattern.
3. Blog posts published to hit a quota. Twelve articles a month that nobody at the practice has read, on topics nobody at the practice would choose.
4. A domain bought because it had links. If someone moved your site onto a domain with history that has nothing to do with your business, that is the second policy by name.
5. Pages placed on someone else’s domain. Coupon sections and “best of” pages hosted on a news or directory site under a brand that has nothing to do with dentistry or roofing. If part of your visibility comes from one of those, May 5 is a date to plan around.

The honest version: if a person wrote every page on your site and there are fewer than fifty of them, this update is not aimed at you. Your rankings may still move while it rolls, because a core update reassesses everything, including the sites it has nothing against.

INP becomes a Core Web Vital on March 12

On March 12, 2024, Interaction to Next Paint replaces First Input Delay in the set of three Core Web Vitals.

First Input Delay measured how long the browser took to start responding to the first tap. It was easy to pass and it flattered nearly everyone. INP measures the whole visit: tap to the screen actually changing, across every interaction, and it reports the slow ones. Booking widgets, chat bubbles, review sliders and a stack of tag manager scripts show up in that number in a way they never did in the old one.

Where local sites lose it, in the order we find them:

• A chat widget loading on every page whether anyone opens it or not.
• A booking or form embed that blocks the page while it initializes.
• Review carousels that call an outside service on load and rebuild the layout when the answer arrives.
• Four or five tracking scripts firing at the same moment.
• Hero sliders and animation libraries pulled in to move one headline.

To see your own numbers, open the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for field data across the site, then run your two most important pages through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Test on a mid-range phone on cellular data, not on the desktop in the office with fiber behind it.

Keep it in proportion. This is a small ranking factor and a large booking factor. A booking form that takes a second to respond to a tap loses people no matter what Google does with the signal.

What we are not doing while the update rolls

• Not rewriting pages mid-update. Rankings move in both directions for weeks during a rollout this size. Changing the site now means you learn nothing about what caused what.
• Not disavowing links. Nothing announced on March 5 is about links.
• Not cutting ad budget because organic wobbled. The paid side did not change. The phone is the number to watch.
• Not touching the Business Profile. The map pack is assembled differently and it does not need a reaction to a core update.
• Not publishing a pile of new content to recover. Given what the new policies describe, that is the least useful reaction available.

What to do this month

• Count the pages on your site, then open three at random and read them as a customer would. If you cannot say what any of them is for, that is your answer.
• If you have bulk city pages, decide which areas you genuinely serve, keep those, and write them properly with real projects, real staff and real detail. Remove the rest rather than leaving them to be judged.
• Ask whoever writes for you what their process is now: who edits, who checks facts, who adds the photos.
• Run your home page and your top service page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile and write down the INP figure so you have a before.
• Remove or defer one script this week. The chat widget on pages nobody chats from is usually the easy win.
• Leave rankings alone until Google says the update has finished, then compare a full month against the month before it.

The sites that come out of a month like this fine are the ones where every page was written for somebody specific. That is the whole of local SEO once you strip the tactics off it, and the speed half of it lives in how the site itself is built. For a practice, the pages worth the effort are the ones that answer what patients actually ask before they call, which is where we start on every dental site we take on.