The Google March 2024 core update finished a week ago and Google did not tell us until today. It finished officially on April 19, 2024, and took 45 days to roll out after starting on March 5, 2024. Google also said this helped reduce low-quality and unoriginal content in search results by 45%, which is up from their estimate of 40%.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google's core update is still rolling out over 7 weeks later and yes we are seeing more fluctuations and chatter. Forbes blocked its coupon directory in preparation for the Google site reputation abuse policy. Google said splitting and merging sites takes longer than normal site migrations...

Google has removed the feature to add publications manually to the Google Publisher Center. Instead, publications will be automatically added when Google's algorithms decide to.

Google is testing placing the date in the snippet on the same line as the URL in the snippet. This is instead of placing it before the snippet's description section.

Google is now sharing the Googlebot IP ranges for the User-triggered fetchers. User-triggered fetchers are from Google tools and product functions where the end user triggers a fetch.

Google and Microsoft both reported very good earnings, driving both stock prices up after hours. I like to dive into the ad revenue side, and it looks like Google Ad revenue was up 13% from last year and Microsoft Advertising revenue was up 12% from last year.

Google Ads is showing yet another new and fun notice to some advertisers. This one shows an impression issue for "Low keyword quality." As a reminder, as for diagnostic insights, quality score is not used in the auction.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Over the past few days, while I was offline, the SEO chatter around the Google search ranking volatility continued to be super heated. The Google tracking tools seemed to calm down a bit, but the chatter is still very heated. This is all while the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 51 days later.

Ed Zitron wrote a piece named The Man Who Killed Google Search. It goes through in detail how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground, he said.

Google has updated its favicon documentation for Google Search to add definitions for each supported rel attribute value in the Google Search favicon documentation.

Google released version 16.1 of the Google Ads API yesterday. The update includes query assets for Demand Gen, more location service details, more support warnings, Target ROAS bid simulation and more.

Want to scare an SEO? Just tell them they need to manage a site migration. Want to make an SEO faint? Tell them they need to manage to split a site into two or more sites while merging content on those sites. John Mueller from Google said it takes Google longer to process site splits and merges than normal site migrations.