Google began rolling out an update on 13 March 2025 and finished it on 27 May. We thought we would publish something detailed on what the March core update changed, which sites won and which lost.
What the March 2025 core update rests on: content quality, user experience and the fight against spam.
Content Quality
Quality content kept winning in this update. The impression Google had been signaling for a while, that the era of very long and largely irrelevant content was ending, took solid shape in March 2025. Take a page built around the phrase “when is the SAT?” that walks the reader through the history of the exam and buries the answer far down the page. That era is over and going. The user wants a simple answer, and the site that gives that answer soonest and most accurately is the one that will win.
As we have said at Türk SEM since 1999, we do not think it is right to waste even one second of anybody’s time. That has been our general approach with every company we consult for. Quality content won and it will keep winning. But; it would be more accurate to put it this way. Quality content won, and whoever gives the highest quality content soonest is the one who will keep winning.
The end of empty chatter in SEO came a long time ago. Make sure your content is full, clear and worth carrying on with. Give the user what they came for as fast as you can.
Tahir Dinç
Sayings on SEO
User Experience
Every year the assumptions people hold about the basics shift. Do you not find that remarkable? Design your new project against today’s data and you may end up with a user experience that is already behind. You have to think about the next shape of design and build for that.
Would it sound strange if I said that designs were far, far more complicated before mobile devices entered our lives? We used to add something to every corner of a blank page, and everything was as big as the space it sat in. Our biggest concern was that the site looked good. How crowded it was did not matter. Then we met the idea of responsive design, and at the time it was extremely involved. Sites broke on iPhones, they broke in Explorer, and working out why was very hard.
Now, placing a single element, we give it separate behavior at 4 different resolutions. Which is why we think about an element many times over before we place it. When we cannot fit something on mobile, hiding it is the quick answer, but it is usually not a healthy one.
I cannot give you a magic sentence for user experience. But; in this update, which Google started in March and completed on 27 May, user experience was pushed well to the front. Google is very keen to perfect the system it uses to understand user experience, and it feeds that system from a good many different sources.
The Fight Against Spam
Google has always fought spam, and it has always preferred to fight it with automated algorithms. Around 2005, when spam appeared as something of a fashion, it took roughly 2 years to deal with. Even the official BMW site turned up among those hiding keywords in pages. These days, when a spam technique surfaces, Google answers it very quickly. And it does that by developing an algorithm for it.
It is not that easy for a company site to be spamming. But; if it does get mixed up in spam, you should know Google will take a negative view of it very quickly. Think about the search engine spiders on your site, by all means, but keep a person at the foundation of it.
Conclusion
The winners: sites that think about the user, that lifted the quality of their content, that do not run aggressive SEO and do not touch spam came out ahead in this update.
The losers: sites that adopted an aggressive SEO strategy lost. Sites that do not think about the user and do not take technical SEO seriously lost.
With the core update it began on 13 March 2025 and completed on 27 May, Google made significant changes to the search results. What sits underneath this update, which shows once more that the user first approach we have argued for at Türk SEM since 1999 is the one that wins, is content quality, user experience and the fight against spam.
