Unveiled in 2022, Google began pushing its long-awaited July 2024 core update on 15 August. Google August 2024 core update.
Google announced that the revised adaptation would remove SEO-babble from the front pages. And favour tiny, non-corporate websites that produced information that readers would find genuinely useful, to help refine search results.
Complete rollout of the project is expected to be completed within one month.
What is the Google August 2024 Core Update?
The Google August 2024 core update is a long-anticipated adjustment of Google’s Search algorithm made to help better understand user needs for search. And improve the quality and relevancy of Google Search results.
Even so, Google also announced an update designed to help impacted sites midway from the Google Helpful Content Update sent on 1 September 2023. And then again said that Google’s March 20, 2024 core update did not make that much of a difference.
The tech giant claims the next update to its core systems on 28 August 2024 will benefit small individual website creators and publishers, through ‘rewarding content’ that provides ‘the best experience for users,’ and ‘reducing rankings for content’ that offers ‘little value’ to users.
Not your average update
According to Google the update differs from the typical basic update.
Google Search Advocate John Mueller declared that August’s core update would be a continuation of Google’s wider efforts of improving Search quality, striving to show users the best content according to their needs, not content made to rank better in Search.
John Mueller wrote on Google Search Central:
Today we’ve started the rollout of our Google August 2024 core update for Search. With this update, we want to improve the quality of our search results by ranking more content meant for humans higher. And less content that appears to be machine-written.
Mueller said that Google developed the update after listening to publishers for months about the core update – which had no impact on their ability to rank continued to bedevil smaller sites and independent publishers alike:
This is the latest update we have issued in response to feedback we received in the past 2 months from both creators and other members of our community. Going forward, we will continue to provide people with a wide range of high quality websites. Including small or independent creators that produce original, valuable and relevant content. This is an area where we will continue to issue updates.
Mueller concluded with the information that many publishers had been waiting to hear:
A ‘secondary enhancement’ in an August 2024 main update ‘tries to reward larger measures. Tthat sites may have taken and to recapture more of the best of the internet’.
Google encourages positive changes from independent sites
While Mueller says that the update will come from listening to editors and publishers. And will include changes to the algorithm in order to reward editing efforts that improved the websites.
If this is actually happening, then content writers might believe that Google’s commitment to showing the highest-quality content. From the most independent (and smaller, less institutional) diverse sources over more unreliable. Reddit information (such as we just saw from the press AI Overviews).
Mueller confirmed this by writing:
The change is also designed to better capture improvements that sites have made, so we can continue to return the best of the web.
Google update guideline
Google has updated help pages with details of the latest changes, and offers more specific guidance on what to do if a site is having ranking problems around or following the rollout.
According to Google Search Status dashboard, the core of the update is “currently still rolling out”. And it is “in line with the major updates”.
Owners of the site hope for a recovery
Search engine optimisation specialists, site owners and publishers had hoped that the real-time core update of March 2024. Would address rumours of rankings volatility – something that’s plagued many of us following. The useful update on content in October 2023.
And quite often, this was not so. Indeed, the situation became worse after Google introduced AI Overviews in May 2024.
Many site owners are still asking if the Google August 2024 core update will solve all those problems and when their websites could have stability restored.
