New Google Changes That Can Affect Online Marketing in 2024

We know Google is the real boss when it comes to controlling the online marketing spine of the internet. Google keeps its search engine algorithms updated regularly with new guidelines to minimize black hat or illegal marketing tricks over the search engine.

Most websites have to stay relevant and updated as per the latest Google search engine guidelines to maintain their top position or appear in the top results.

Such changes also affect the online marketing efforts of companies. In the year 2024, things are no different!

Here is a list of major changes made by Google that must be kept in mind by online marketers while promoting their brand or website over the Internet.

What are these changes? Let’s have a look:

Improved quality ranking

In its March 2024 search update, Google announced that it is making crucial changes in its search algorithms and ranking systems to ensure that only the best quality results with information that genuinely helps searchers are shown. The latest Google update also aims to reduce unoriginal or low-quality content in search results.

The latest update is a continuation of the Search Engine’s 2022 update to ranking systems involving increased emphasis on original and meaningful content and pushing unoriginal pages to the end of search results. In its newest update, Google is working on improving its core ranking systems to better identify low-quality web pages that are unhelpful, offer a poor experience to users, or was created primarily for search engines (with very specific search queries) rather than users.

According to the official post on the Google blog, the new ranking updates combined with previous enhancements will help make Search more efficient and helpful for everyone, reducing low-quality results by 40%.

New and improved spam policies

In the same update, Google also notified about prominent changes in its spam policies to identify and remove low-quality content from Search results. These include but are not limited to expired websites or old domains now being used as spam repositories by their new owners.

Google introduced several improvements to its existing spam policies to better handle new ways that creators and marketers use to get their low-quality content to rank higher in search results. For one, the search engine giant reemphasized its policy against the use of automated tools such as ChatGPT to generate low-quality content at scale to boost search ranking.

This type of content is not at all helpful to users, which is why Google is working on strengthening its policy to identify all instances where content has been produced at scale to boost rankings – whether by humans, automation or a combination of both – and take appropriate actions to prevent content with no real value from appearing higher in search results.

Google’s new update also aims to identify and penalize low-value content and pages published by third parties on high-authority websites to gain high rankings by leveraging the credibility of these established websites.

Another type of spam that Google intends to address with its latest update involves repurposing expired or unused domains for publishing and ranking low-quality or duplicate content. Google’s algorithm will identify and mark such content and websites as spam to prevent them from appearing higher in Search.

NEW CHAT FEATURE

This new feature has not been implemented by the company but is still a great project for users as well as the companies associated with the search engine.

The New Chat feature, which the company is going to introduce very soon, will allow business owners to interact with their clients directly through a chat process.

By getting this feature, you will be able to get in contact directly with all the business people on your dashboard. This will make things very easy, as there will be no mediator between you and your clients.

The feature is still in the testing process, so only a selected business can check it out. The rest of the people, don’t bother to even try entering the testing program, as you are not allowed to access that.

Google will send every business holder, who is selected for the testing program, the rest of the people have to wait a bit to get it available to everyone.

MOBILE-FIRST INDEX

Now, what exactly does Google mean about Mobile Indexing? By this, it simply means that all of your websites running on the internet have to be mobile responsive too.

Google from now onwards, will rank the searched results on the basis of your mobile ranking. So if your, website is still not mobile-friendly, you need to hurry up! Because things are going to be very complex for you.

Mobile-friendly sites are an essential requirement for an efficient SEO. The number of mobile searches is increasing at lightning speed day by day, as the number of smartphone holders or users is also increasing rapidly, so you now have to focus on offering great quality mobile responsive sites to get an admirable ranking on the list.

Google crawlers will only end up crawling the mobile version of your websites, so, if you have used all of your sources to develop your SEO-friendly website for desktop only, you have to pay some more attention to the mobile version now.

Maybe it would be a bad experience for some of the website owners if some of your content is exclusively available on the desktop version of your website, Google crawlers will not be able to read that and you will not get the deserved or required ranking.

PENALIZE MOBILE SITES GETTING BUGGING POP-UPs

Seeing unnecessary advertisement Pop-Ups on any website is the most irritating part for any Internet user.

To resolve this problem, little boxes were adopted to advertise anything instead of covering up the whole web page.

But, that technique also didn’t work out, as the boxes hide some of the content of the page, and if a user tries to close that box, he/she will end up landing on some other page.

These are the common frustrating experiences for any user, so now, the search engine giant has taken some steps to sort it out. Here we have a list of things, which will now be considered intrusive by Google:

The pop-ups appear just after the user leaves the search engine redirect to the desired page, and hide the main content of the page.

The dialogue boxes, have to be closed by the user personally to get the content of the page. The interstitials, are in the folded position on the page and hide the real content beneath them.

So, these changes will take place in the search engine. Tell your SEO to buckle up and make the required changes on the site till then.

LINK BUILDING

Link Building or Backlinking basically is the most important factor in raising a website’s ranking in Google searches. It will increase your organic ranking and will have an effect on your overall ranking.

These are different from Outbound links, in Outbound links, the links will direct you from your website to another website, but in Backlinking, you will be directed to a different page on the same website.

CONTENT

Content is and will be the main factor in your Google ranking. Last year, around the same time, Google introduced its AI RankBrain to the world.

By this, the idea of keyword density was eliminated, as its main motive was to understand the related content and to provide relevant search results to the user.

Keyword stuffing and irrelevant content got trashed out after this technology was introduced.

So, from now all you need to take care of is that your content on the site should be fresh and relevant according to your services or business.