August 2024 Core Update
Google released the August 2024 core update today.
Google’s John Mueller – Search Advocate wrote a blog post about this update. I find it super interesting that he mentioned “small or independent sites” and said that Google aim to connect these people with high quality sites including small or independent sites which are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches.
This is interesting because after rollout of September Helpful Content Update last year we have seen many small/independent sites absolutely getting demoli shed in Google’s Search Results and loosing a lot of organic traffic. Even after months of the update rollout no site have recovered to ranking levels which they were at before September 2023.
While there were some theories around what happened with Helpful Content Update or why these sites got hit but I think that there was not something concrete enough to say that a site is hit because of these reasons.
SEO Professional Lily Ray did some research about this and put together this list of reasons because of which a site may have been hit by Helpful Content Update but again as I mentioned before its not concrete enough because I ended up finding many sites which were doing things that Lily mentioned but were not hit by the update.
But with release of August 2024 Core Update Google I’m watching out to see if sites previously hit by September Helpful Content Update will recover or not. Google has said that this update will take around a month to roll out. But Semrush Sensor which tracks changes in Google’s Search Results is showing really high score which means that a lot of ranking changes are going on in the search results. So we might start to see SIGNIFICANT ranking improvement or decrease soon …..
Here are some of screenshots of Semrush Dashboard for sites which were impacted by September Helpful Content Update.
As of now I’m not seeing much ranking improvement for any but we will just need to wait and watch. I will update this article – if I notice some changes.
Updated on 17 Aug (Melbourne – Australia time) 👇
I noticed that a niche site owner got a Manual Action from Google which is suprising. But its not certain if its because of the August Core Update or not. I found this interesting that’s why adding it here.
And my friend Deepak who builds sites using Programmatic SEO is also noticing improvements for his programmatic sites.
And SEO Professional Gael Breton (@GaelBreton on X) posted about Guitar Chalk which is a niche site talking about Guitars and now with the rollout of this August Core Update – this site is picking up in the ranking and improving.
And regarding the same site SEO Professional Glenn Gabe also shared a screenshot of keywords ranking showing significant improvements in the ranking for this site.
SEO Professional Lily Ray has also shared coupe of ranking improvement screenshots showing upticks in traffic after release of the core update. She also mentioned that its +590% improvement compared to where it was 2 days ago.
Another SEO Professional Gareth Boyd also shared screenshot showing up tick in traffic & ranking of keywords after the start of core update rollout. He mentioned that “Sites that were very vocal about Google are all getting an uptick“.
I have to agree with this because so far I have checked on 54 sites that were impacted by September Helpful Content Update last year but none is showing any improvement – I do know that update will take weeks to roll out and there will be changes in rankings over these weeks.
But still its weird that sites which have been scrutinising Google for loosing traffic due to HCU are already seeing improvement within a day of rollout start while none of other sites on my list are NOT – ahhh weird!!!
Moving forward – people related to House Fresh and The World Travel Guy both saying that they are noticing some ranking improvements. These two sites were significantly impacted by the HCU.
Another thing was image thumbnails not showing up next to URLs in Search Results this issue started around January and over time it has became so big and sooo many sites where impacted by this – there was a flood of site owners complaining about this issue in Google’s Search Console Help forums and was seeking an answer from Google about this.
But in May Google locked this thread and just told site owners that they should follow the guidelines and recommended to read what Google already says about Helpful Content.
Even recently on 29 June Google said that these sites whose thumbnails are missing might see a comeback when the new core update is released. I just checked in with couple of site owners who were impacted with this issue – out of all just one said that there thumbnails are being shown in Search Results again.
I checked some queries myself for their site and yes its being shown now.
It early to say if the major issue for all site owners who were impacted by this issue will get resolved by this core update – but we just need to wait and see – its too early now to say anything concrete.
Also related to this I noticed that on X – Arnaud Sion mentioned that thumbnails are back.
Let’s see what happens when the update rolls out over the upcoming weeks.
Updated on 18 Aug (Melbourne – Australia time) 👇
Site owners are now noticing declines in Google Discover visibility.
And I’m also noticing same for couple of publishers but I can’t say for sure if its due to the Core Update or on going ranking issue which might be affecting Google Discover as well.
Need to wait and see if this settles down over time.
And still I’m not seeing any movement for sites affected by HCU expect a few.
I asked Abhishek as well who is founder of Gadgets To Use a tech blog based out of Delhi, India. His site was impacted by HCU too and not recovering as of now.
Here are some other screenshots showing sites affected by HCU which are not recovering as of now.
Here are the ones which are noticing some improvement.
Super Fast Python – Python Programming Tutorials site run by Jason Brownlee and is now coming being it was hit by HCU back in Sep 2023 when Google rolled out HCU.
I posted about it back then.
And now its coming which it should I think because content written by Jason is actually helpful.
Another one is Travel Lemmings – as the name itself suggests this site publish content about travelling and was affected by HCU and then was impacted by recent March Core Update as well.
Also in June I noticed that Nate Hake founder of this site continued the site despite being hit by updates.
Now from Semrush data it seems like ranking is improving but as Nate has been offline for a while so its not possible to confirm with him. Also in the last tweet from Nate he showed some frustration about SEO Community.
Also Gisele Navaroo from HouseFresh posted these and said that traffic is now coming back after the update. I already briefly mentioned HouseFresh above.
You can click on images to expand.
Also Callie Scott shared this screenshot of Google Search Console showing up tick in the clicks & impressions data in Google Search Console.
And both Daniel Hart and Carlos González who runs independent publications also told me that they are not seeing recovery recently.
You can click on images to expand.
Updated on 20 Aug (Melbourne – Australia time) 👇
Some context from SEO Professional Lily Ray about recoveries of sites during the core updates.
Some people are still not seeing any recovery!!
Some declines has been INSANE and I’m surprised to see these kind of declining graphs.
I noticed a long detailed post about HouseFresh which I have mentioned above as well – it was one of the site that was really hit hard by Sep HCU – but now seeing some improvement.
Here is the long detailed post mentioning what Chris noticed.
On another the Image Thumbnails are now coming back – I explained this issue above and now some site owners are noticing return of thumbnails.
Some other things related to August 2024 Core Update
This explains what has changed in Google’s Documentation – what was added or changed.
August 2024 core update: Showing more content that people find genuinely useful. Here’s what has changed in Google’s documentation.
The August core update is here! Google’s documentation on core updates has changed significantly. Let’s take a look at what has changed.
Some interesting tweets about August Core Update from SEO Professional.
Also Glenn has been reporting about ranking movement of sites affected by September Helpful Content from last year. Which has been super useful for the whole SEO Community to keep a track of if sites affected by HCU were seeing some ranking improvement or no.
From this tracking it was found that no site affected by HCU recovered. That’s why I think that as now August Core Update is rolling it would be super interesting to see what Glenn post.
Will there be recovery of significant number of sites were affected by HCU – will just need to wait and see ………….
Update from Glenn Gabe where he shared some screenshots of sites which are recovering. You can check these tweets to see the graphs of ranking.
You can click on images to expand.
Update from Glenn here 👇 (some of key points which I found interesting)
……… There are about 30-35 in my list of 380+ that have surged with this core update so far ….
………… Some big surges and drops across health and medical sites, finance sites, etc …….
………. some sites that either surged or dropped quickly, and then reversed quickly ……
Another one is this comment by a Reddit user – “I’m sick of being shocked. I don’t want to be shocked anymore. I want to be bored and ignored.“
I found it super funny because I have also been in this situation recently.
Because there has been insane ranking volatility over last couple of weeks as has been reported by Search Engine Roundtable.
On top of that I have been waiting for update to rollout & finish so that I can start working on a site migration for one of my client.
SEO Trade Publication 😁 Search Engine Roundtable has also covered some recent chatter in the SEO community here 👇 there is a lot going on …………
Some Google Helpful Content Update Resurrections With August Core Update
As you know, Google released the August 2024 core update on Thursday and then shortly after confirmed a ranking bug impacting a large number of search results (which is still not fixed as of the time of this story).
Added on 5th Nov
Thank you August Core Update 🤗 pic.twitter.com/1obbGqXbPC
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) November 4, 2024
Nice ranking improvement for this website with August Core Update, I noticed it today. It’s a tutoring provider in Melbourne, couple of months back I was working with them as stats tutor for high schoolers.
Then did some SEO work for free (they NGO) probably Google liked it. That’s why this site gained a lot of positions for highly competitive keywords. NICE 🙂