Overview
Launched: August 15, 2024
Rollout: Completed September 3, 2024
Important Information Regarding Recent Google Search Changes
- August 2024 Core Update Completed: Google has officially concluded the rollout of its August 2024 Core Update as of September 3, 2024. This update aimed to:
- Improve the overall quality of search results
- Show more genuinely useful content
- Better capture site improvements
- Surface content from small or independent sites creating useful, original content.
- Impact on Search Rankings: The update was global, affecting all regions/languages. All types of content and results were impacted such as Google Discover, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and more.
- Polled Results: Based on a poll across various SEO teams
- 44% of sites experienced ranking/traffic drops
- 27% saw ranking/traffic increases
- 29% reported no change
- Unique Insights: This update was not a penalty to sites, but aimed to reward great web pages and sites. There was a lot of feedback from SEO’s regarding unfair treatment from Google, especially considering the negative impact many sites experience from the September 2023 core update.
Recommendations
- Review Google’s Resources:
- Ranking Updates Page: Stay informed about Google’s updates and their potential impact on your website.
- Debugging Search Traffic Drops: Learn how to identify and address drops in search traffic. Google’s advice for sites impacted by core updates can be found here.
- Creating Helpful Content: Understand Google’s guidelines for creating high-quality content.
- Focus on Quality Content: Continue to prioritize the creation of original, informative, and user-centric content.
- Monitor Search Performance: Utilize tools like Google Search Console to track your website’s search performance and identify any significant changes.
- Consider providing feedback to Google: If your site was negatively impacted by the HCS despite efforts to improve content, consider submitting feedback through Google’s provided channels (Google has not provided a feedback form, yet). Note, Google will not address general feedback regarding specific queries, pages, and the like.
- Diversify traffic sources: While focusing on SEO improvements, diversifying traffic sources to reduce dependence on Google Search.
Additional Notes
- It’s been reported anecdotally that sites affected by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update have seen some recovery with this update.
- Google will continue refining its ranking systems and may not announce all future updates.
- Google wrote this on its blog when the August 2024 core update rolled out.
“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.
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 update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to surface the best of the web.
We’ve also updated our help page about core updates, which includes more in-depth guidance for those who may see changes after an update.”
Winners & Losers Data
Site Category Analysis of Top Domains
Reviewing site visibility of the top 5600 domains, the site categories that experienced the largest negative impact after the August 2024 update are:
Negatively Impacted (more losers than winners)
- News & Media 📑
- Travel & Hospitality ✈️
- Business & Corporate 👔
Moderately Impacted (split winners/losers)
- Education 📚
- Health & Wellness 💪
- Technology 📱
- Government 📝
Positively Impacted (more winners than losers)
- Social Media 👥
- Entertainment 🎉
- Science & Research 🔬
- Ecommerce 📦
Ecommerce sites were positively impacted by the March 2024 update, which is interesting to see a mix between visibility of winners/losers. Generally speaking, 57% of Ecommerce sites experienced positive results.
Top social media sites like reddit, linkedin and others continue to dominate the SERPs in terms of visibility. In the chart below, we can see that (4) social media sites account for 90% of all social media visibility; meaning the spread is quite in-equally distributed. We can also see that roughly 10-12% of domains account for 90% of top domain traffic.
-> Download the supporting data from this analysis
Volatility Data
Source: SEO Round Table
