Google March 2024 spam update
Google began rolling out the March 2024 spam update on 5 March 2024 and confirmed it complete on 20 March 2024 — a rollout of 16 days. The average spam update with a recorded start and finish has taken 10.3 days, so this one was 5.7 days longer than usual.
| Type | Spam update |
|---|---|
| Affected systems | Ranking |
| Since the previous one | 153 days after the October 2023 spam update (the average gap between spam updates is 464 days) |
| Record | Compiled from the public record. The date is the announced start; no clock time was published. Google announced or confirmed this update. |
What a spam update is
A spam update targets violations of Google's spam policies — link schemes, scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse. Unlike a core update, there usually is something specific on an affected site to find and remove.
What to do when an update lands · How long Google updates take · Everything running on 5 Mar 2024
Also running at the time
Overlapping events make a traffic change harder to attribute — worth knowing before blaming this update alone.
About this page
Dates are Google's own, in UTC. The rollout duration and every comparison on this page are calculated here from those dates — Google publishes neither. Coverage is drawn from the headlines this site archived at the time, so updates that predate the archive show none. Corrections are welcome at contact [at] seo-serps.info.