Key statistics:
— The average word count on page 1 of Google results decreased by 9.9%.
— The average quantity of H2 sub-headlines on page 1 remained essentially the same.
— The average quantity of H3 sub-headlines on page 1 also remained the same.
— The average quantity of H4 sub-headlines decreased by 7.4%.
— The average quantity of images within the main content dropped by 7.7%.
— The relevance score, a unique On-Page.ai metric, saw a slight 2.8% reduction.
— While the overall raw entity count decreased due to the reduced word count, the entity density actually increased by 8.2%.
Observed trends:
1. AI content is everywhere. Both good and bad sites have AI content.
2. AI content does not seem to have been impacted and still ranks just as well as before (as long as the site is seen as favorable). That said, sites using low quality, generic AI content were more prone to drops. Sites that employed highly engaging content (created by AI or by humans) seemed to perform better.
3. Mentions of specific expertise within the page do not seem necessary. Include them IF you believe this will help your readers feel as if they can trust your content.
4. It appears as if having good articles might not be enough if you’re relying entirely on Google visitors. Some affiliate sites had decent content and were still penalized.
5. Affiliate websites seem to have been impacted the most.
6. Local websites have seen a minimal / negligible impact from the update.
7. Ecommerce websites have not seen a major impact from the update.
8. Resource sites do not seem to have been impacted as from the update.
9. Sites with a large social media following thrived during the update.
10. It appears as if once the website is deemed to be trusted, then Google falls back to favoring entity density to as a primary ranking factor.
Links
Links (both external and internal) did not seem influence if a website was affected or not. Some penalized sites had hundreds of thousands of links while others with very few links thrived. Links do matter… however they don’t seem to protect you from the wrath of the March core update.
This latest update, Google could very well integrate website metric score into the equation, increasing the impact of user behavior on links and overall rankings.
[PageRank] x [Topical relevance ] x [Trust score] x [Anchor text relevance] x [Websitre Metric Score] = Final Link Score
https://on-page.ai/pages/google-march-2024-core-update/
