Google launches the March 2023 Core Update
Six months or, to be precise, 184 days: this is the distance between the September 2022 Core Update and brand new algorithmic update just released by Google, simply called the March 2023 Core Update. There has been a lot of news on the Search front this semester, so it will be really important to keep track of the changes coming: in the meantime, let’s take a look at the information we can count on right now!
March 2023 Core Update launches
“Today we released the March 2023 Core Update, which will take about 2 weeks to fully roll out”: this is the stringent official communication that came from Google, posted both on the relevant updates page and on social channels.
As usual, SEOs interpret these words as a signal to “fasten your seatbelts,” because SERPs and rankings are about to change in the wake of the algorithmic changes Google has decided to implement.
What Google’s broad core updates mean
Broad core updates or major updates, we know, are in fact the interventions that designed to further Google’s mission, which can be summarized in the phrase “delivering useful and reliable results to users performing searches.” At the end of analyzing, testing, and evaluating feedback on the quality of results (which also relies on the work of quality raters, although it does not directly affect ranking), Google makes changes to the way its systems evaluate content overall. As a result of these changes, some pages that were previously not rated as highly as they deserved in the search results may receive a boost in rankings, while previously well-ranked pages may lose visibility.
This is not a penalty for those who are downgraded, because there tends to be nothing wrong with the work performed and the content published: simply, there are pages that, in light of the new ratings introduced by the update, offer better content, deemed to be of higher quality and more useful to users.
It is also for this reason that it is important to know when Google updates its search ranking algorithms, so that we have a time reference in analyzing our site’s performance and check whether pages have had positive or negative changes in terms of ranking – while also keeping an eye on our SERP Observatory tool to monitor the impact of the update in quantitative terms.
Previous updates and Google’s latest news
As mentioned at the outset, the March 2023 Core Update comes a full 6 months after the previous major update, the September 2022 Core Update (for the record, it is not record distance between two broad core updates, which still belongs to the May 2020 and December 2020 pair with 213 days, albeit in the midst of a pandemic), but certainly the change and testing activity on SERPs has not stood still during 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 internationally (including Italy), and then various minor interventions against spam; above all, however, there has been the launch of Helpful Content System worldwide and the updating of the Search Quality Raters Guidelines. The latter two very interventions were particularly interesting for search marketers, because they introduced the concept of “useful content” (a definition that adds to the now-iconic “quality content” formula in identifying Google’s determinants) and added the E of experience to the EEAT paradigm, an increasingly crucial reference for SEO.
And then, we must not forget the other huge news that has also plunged into the search world, namely the spread of Artificial Intelligence systems applied to content creation, which has led Google to officially clarify its position with respect to the algorithmic evaluation of such AI-written texts.
Lots of irons in the fire, then, which the March update could/should turn into ranking changes in light of the new requirements, making a simple correlational assumption.
The curious case of Youtube’s disappearance from Google: an early update?
Speaking of coincidences, then, we note another curious event.
In the day of March 14 – the day before the launch of the update was made official – Barry Schwartz had reported the “disappearance” of YouTube’s home page from Google USA search results (while in Italian there were no apparent changes): in practice, the query [ youtube ] in Search did not lead as usual to YouTube’s home page, but the SERP returned results of Wikipedia, YouTube’s Android app on Google Play, the iOS app on Apple.com, YouTube’s blog and others, but not youtube.com.
On the contrary, the query [ youtube home page ] led to the desired home page, and thus the “problem” was about ranking and not indexing.
One of the comments to the article said that this situation “is recurring when the core update is released, which will be announced when the impact is a little wider, in a day or two.” Which indeed was the case, because the announcement came not even 24 hours after this disappearance (which, then, returned to normal quickly, as we can also see from today’s screen).
