Google launched a significant core update on August 15, 2024. Since that time it’s been bumpy waters in the Google search results, as you can see from the search engine volatility tracker from Semrush:
So what happened with this core update, what do you need to know, and what can you do to ensure your site doesn’t fall off the search results? We’ll explore all that and more.
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August 2024 core update: What happened?
Google typically introduces updates to its core search algorithm a couple of times a year. The August core update was “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 wrote in a statement.
Google also stated that the August core update incorporated feedback from creators. We can assume this was mostly in response to the March 2024 core update which caused performance issues for many websites and a lot of unrest in the industry.
Since the update started rolling out on August 15, there have been reports from third-party data providers that this update was particularly volatile. Google announced that the update was complete rolling out on September 3, but there have been rumblings of reversals in the weeks since the update was complete:
Something is definitely going on with the SERPs atm.
Traffic is dropping back down.
Articles that were ranking are vanishing…yet again.
Searching for particular articles with the site name isn’t returning the right results.
More spam than usual in SERPs atm.
Noticing this?
— Jake Boly | That Fit Friend (@Jake_Boly) September 19, 2024
Glenn Gabe also covered this in a recent video:
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What we’re seeing since the August core update
Anecdotally, for publishing/affiliate types of sites, we’ve seen some graphs that look like this:
This specific site saw a significant recovery, but not a complete recovery–this is the last 16 months, and if you pulled the graph back further traffic would have been even higher. Importantly, nothing was changed on the site to drive these changes, from the initial level, the drop beginning in October of 2023, and the recent recovery–this is all just the result of Google reordering search results.
This site did not recover on commercial/affiliate types of terms. In other words, rankings for informational queries such as “how big will my labradoodle get” have rebounded, but not rankings for terms with higher commercial intent like “best X for Y,” e.g. “best dog food for a labradoodle.”
Those more commercial search results are now dominated by authoritative sites like Forbes.
For certain types of business sites (B2B, SaaS, and ecommerce) we’ve seen multiple instances with graphs along these lines:
For this site, the primary SEO activities were:
- “Pruning” or removing under-performing content (particularly content that was both highly optimized for SEO and either wasn’t generating traffic and/or wasn’t getting strong engagement).
- Updating internal linking to avoid overly aggressive anchor text.
- Removing off-topic content that wasn’t tightly aligned with the core focus areas of the site.
These activities may have led to the recovery, but we’ve also seen instances like the example above where no action was taken, and we’re not the only ones:
Some may say this is a small recovery…
I say, it’s a glimmer of hope for SEO.
Let me be clear:
→ If this website SUCKED, it wouldn’t recover.
→ We changed nothing during this time.If your site ISN’T recovering, you have to ask yourself:
Should it have been getting… pic.twitter.com/etaVnj1KLl
— Ryan Darani (@SearchForRyan) August 23, 2024
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What does Google say about the August core update?
Google’s own post about the August core update is typically vague, but with at least a nod to some of the recoveries for independent sites (which we’ll cover in a bit):
“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, when relevant to users’ searches. This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates. This update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web.”
The implication here seems to be something along the lines of:
- The mix of dials that caused smaller/independent sites to get smashed in the Helpful Content Update and some subsequent updates were tuned to allow some of those sites to recover.
- The time frame for those sites being reconsidered and “allowed” to rebound was shortened.
If you’re a small business owner/operator, however, you likely don’t have time to read the tea leaves on Google update summaries. So what are the practical takeaways here?
What does the core update mean for your small business?
It depends.
If you have a local services business and are targeting a mix of map listings and local organic rankings: you may not have felt the core update at all.
Google’s core updates don’t impact local map rankings, so if that’s your primary source of traffic and leads from Google search, you may be experiencing local SEO in 2024 as an oasis of low volatility.
Let’s look at the query “home remodeling near me.” I searched for this from Wilmington, Massachusetts, on my desktop so that’s the results I get.
Here is the search result:
In this search result, we have:
- Local Service Ads (ads, obviously).
- Google Ads (ads again).
- Maps results (local business listings, but not impacted by the August core update).
- PAAs and search suggestions (which effectively keep you on Google’s search result page longer, or send you to a different Google search results page).
- Organic listings.
Only the stuff in orange in this screenshot is even eligible to be impacted by the August core update. There are 17 entities on this page (between ad listings, PAA questions, search suggestions, map results, and organic listings) and only two are organic listings!
Now, it’s important to note that not every search result looks like this. If I look specifically for “home remodeling Wilmington MA” I see a very different SERP experience:
While it’s top-loaded with ads and map listings, this SERP has about 50/50 organic listings versus everything else.
Even so: if you were All Matters General Contracting or NE Home Services, your lead flow from this search result wouldn’t be impacted by the August core update at all.
If you are generating clicks and leads from the organic listings, there may be a bit more shakeup. Here’s an example of rankings shifts from July versus the current for home remodeling Boston:
Both Angi and Yelp saw slight jumps in rankings, and there’s some general movement here. If we spot-check organic listings from other areas we see similar results with a fair amount of movement:
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How to respond
First off, you want to see if you were impacted by the update at all. Google actually has some pretty good advice for this:
If you do see a drop in traffic after the core update, a couple of things to consider would be:
- Do you have a large number of pages built for search that either don’t get much traffic, and/or have very bad engagement (people leave quickly after visiting the page)?
- Are you using very aggressive anchor text in links you get from other sites, and/or within your own site? In other words when another site links to your site do they use text like “Demers Construction” (not aggressive anchor text) or do they always use “exact match” anchor text for the keyword you’re targeting like “home remodeling wilmington ma?”
If you’re not sure how many pages your site has or what content is being created for you (by your own team or by an SEO you hired, for instance) you can look in Google Search Console:
If the number surprises you, you can then drill down to see the actual pages that are being indexed and not. Similarly, you can go to google.com and type site:yoururl.com and quickly see the pages Google has indexed for your site (note that this is a rough estimate, and you don’t always see all of the pages indexed):
In this instance, you’ll note there are 10 pages of results for this local home remodeling company, and if you click to the last page of results, you can see there are actually several more listings:
This may be fine and by design for this site, but if this were a site that had taken a hit in terms of traffic, it may be due to the fact that they have a larger number of pages than necessary being indexed.
For analyzing backlinks you’ll need a third-party tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or similar to look at the anchor text pointing to your site:
In this case, we can quickly see that a lot of the text linking to this site is branded or generic anchors, so the issue for this site likely isn’t overly aggressive exact match anchors (if we looked at this report and saw a heavy percentage of anchor text like “home remodeling wilmington ma” that would be a potential red flag).
Most SEO best practices are still best practices
Certain SEO tactics that used to work don’t work anymore, and certain mixes of tactics won’t be as impactful as they used to.
But for the most part basic SEO best practices still work. If you have a small business, you likely want to focus on:
- Optimizing your Google Business Profile for search.
- Getting more positive reviews.
- Getting local citations and making sure your data is consistent.
- Building location pages and making sure they’re targeting the right keywords.
- Building links to your site generally and into your location pages.
Additionally, a key takeaway here is that if you have a mix of:
- Local Services Ads (for services businesses)
- Google Ads
- A map presence
- Organic listings
You may still be impacted by core updates, but your leads from Google will be much better diversified and much more resilient to future updates (no matter how volatile they may be).