Google has just released a new core update. It hopes to improve the quality of the SERPs, which is necessary right now.

The effects are already starting to hit, with some popular SEOs reporting that a lot of their websites have been deindexed completely.

What’s going on?

To me it looks like Google has started taking out people that were very vocal about how they were using AI and Black Hat SEO techniques to rank well and make money.

People like Jackie Chou and Julian Goldie.

Julian especially was very public about how he was using AI to create huge amounts of low-quality, ‘spammy’ content very quickly. And this content was ranking, getting traffic and making money!

Google hates this!

And they needed to stop this. They needed to make an example of people doing this.

So they started slapping manual penalties on people who were doing this.

The effect was that entire portfolios of websites were completely removed from the Google Index.

But to be clear, this is humans at Google giving out this penalities. Not the algorithm.

Then, the Algorithm started to hit.

I recorded the video above a couple of days ago.

My two case study niche sites, canyouwash.it and snackeagle.com were doing ok at that time.

However, I checked my search console today (9th March 2024), and they appear to be in decline.

It seems to me that the SERPs don’t contain any smaller or independent sites anymore.

If I look at the SERPs for the top keywords of each site they look very different.

Here are the results for the term ‘how to clean ll bean slippers‘ that can you wash.it used to rank well for:

• The top result is the New York Times wirecutter with a small paragraph about the topic.
• No useful guide or anything.
• The next 3 results are YouTube videos which are quite useful.
• Next we have the large established site hunker.com which has a very short guide on the topic.
• Then it’s Pinterest with a completely useless image.
• Next up, it’s shoemgk.com, which is basically selling you their cleaning products.
• Reddit makes an appearance next without any real guides.
• Shoe MGK is back after Reddit with another page selling their products.
• Then it’s medium.com – and to me this is obviously a parasite SEO page just to get a link.
• Basically, all the results are horrible.

I guess it’s early days for the update and we’ll wait and see but it doesn’t look great for users of Google and small website owners alike.