Google released the August 2024 core update today. It will take about a month to fully roll out.
This update is not just a normal core update. The August 2024 core update takes into account the feedback Google heard since the September 2023 helpful content update that seemed to have a negative impact on many small and independent publishers.
What Google is saying. John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, wrote.
“Today, we launched our August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”
Google said this update aims to promote useful content from small and independent publishers, after Google listened to feedback it received since the release of the March 2024 core update. Mueller added:
“This latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months. As always, we aim to connect people with a range of high quality sites, including ‘small’ or ‘“’independent’ sites that are creating useful, original content on relevant searches. This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates.”
This August 2024 core update “aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to surface the best of the web,” Mueller added.
Guidance updated. Google posted several updates to its help page about core updates, including more in-depth guidance for those who may see changes after an update.
More details. Google told us we should expect a core update soon, after many publishers have become concerned and anxious about the next update.
Since then we have seen a tremendous amount of Google search ranking volatility without a confirmation from Google on a core update or any update of its kind. In fact, this morning, I posted about even more intense Google Search ranking volatility on Search Engine Roundtable.
What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. Google has not really given much new advice here.
There aren’t specific actions to take to recover. A negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages.
Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update.
Google said you can see a bit of a recovery between core updates but the biggest change would be after another core update.
In short, write helpful content for people and not to rank in search engines.
“There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people. For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page,” Google said previously.
Previous core updates. The previous core update – the March 2024 core update – was the largest core update, according to Google. It started March 5 and completed 45 days later on April 19.
Here’s a timeline and our coverage of recent core updates:
The March 2024 core update was on March 5th and ended on April 19.
The November 2023 core update was on November 2nd and ended on November 28.
The October 2023 core update was on October 5th and ended on October 19
The August 2023 core update was on August 22nd and ended on September 7.
The March 2023 core update was on March 15th and ended on March 28th.
Other updates. We did have a spam update between the last core update and this core update. It was the June 2024 spam update that started on June 20 and took 7 days to finish rolling out, completing on June 27.
Why we care. Many sites are hoping, and have been hoping, to see improvements with the last core update ever since the September 2023 helpful content update rolled out. Most, if not all, of those sites that were hit in September did not see recoveries. They were hoping to see recoveries with the March 2024 core update, but did not.
Now, with this August 2024 core update, many of those sites hit by previous updates will be watching closely to see if their sites recover over the next few weeks.