How We’re Responding to Google’s March 2024 Core Update

🔄 Our Response to Google’s March 2024 Core Update

At MedicareWire, we’ve proudly served seniors with independent Medicare plan research since 2012. In March 2024, Google released a major core algorithm update that significantly impacted many trusted sites, including ours. While we continue to believe in the value of our work, we’ve taken this moment to reflect, improve, and level up across the board. We are committed to the highest YMYL standards.

🔍 What Happened

Following the March 2024 update, many of our plan location and detail pages lost visibility in Google Search. These pages contain licensed data from CMS, detailed plan benefits, and educational resources designed to help people make informed decisions about their healthcare without sales and marketing interference.

🧠 What We’ve Changed

• UX/UI Overhaul: Pages now feature faster load times, easier navigation, mobile-first layouts, and fully accessible HTML markup.
• Schema.org Enhancements: We’ve integrated robust structured data including HealthInsurancePlan, Product, FAQPage, Dataset, DataCatalog, BreadcrumbList, Person, and Organization schemas.
• Data Provenance Enhancements: The Medicare landscape is chocked-full of data (i.e., premiums, deductible, copays, coinsurance, plan names, ratings, etc.) making it nearly impossible for Medicare beneficiaries and caretakers to know what information they can trust. So we invented a fresh method of tagging data with verifiable data provenance information.
• Accessibility Enhancements: We painstakingly reworked our pages to add Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) markup to make our web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
• Automated Medicare Benchmark Data: The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) grants the public access to records held by federal agencies. While the law grants public access, it does not require it to be easy. Some CMS data is scattered about, often first found on CMS press releases when the agency announces new premiums, deductible, IRMAA surcharges, etc. We developed a method of centralizing and automating the update of of CMS benchmark data, so that ever page showing that data is always correct.
• Author Transparency: All content is authored by David Bynon, a Medicare analyst with 12+ years of experience and a verifiable author bio, education, and military service record.
• First-Party Data Disclosure: We clearly identify our data sources, include last-modified dates, and provide direct links to CMS.gov datasets.
• Compliance & Editorial Integrity: We follow CMS marketing guidelines and maintain editorial independence. We also disclose all compensation and partner relationships.

In the process of making these sweeping improvements to MedicareWire, many of them requiring novel methods and advanced techniques, we realized our method deserved protection, so we applied for a provisional patent on our intellectual property.

📈 What We’re Committed To

We believe that Medicare shoppers deserve accurate, unbiased, and accessible plan information. Our mission hasn’t changed, but our platform has improved to reflect the evolving standards of Google Search and user expectations.

If you’re a Google quality rater, search engineer, or reviewer — we welcome your feedback. We’ve worked hard to align with Google’s Helpful Content System and the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

🔗 Recent Improvements

• Medicare Advantage Plan Pages
• How We Make Money
• Research Methodology

🗣️ Questions or Feedback?

Email us at [email protected]. We welcome your thoughts and will continue to improve.

— The MedicareWire Team