Image: Kai Wenzel on Unsplash
Google’s Danny Sullivan has spoken about the impacts of the August 2024 core update, providing guidance and aiming to manage expectations for sites hoping for a full recovery after earlier updates.
Site recovery
When the August core update was released, Google said it was taking into account feedback from creators, and that the update aimed to “better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web”.
Many small, independent publishers who were badly hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update were pinning their hopes on seeing a recovery after this latest update.
Data emerging since the update completed indicates a mixed picture of gains and losses, but not the significant recovery many were hoping for.
In an interview with Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwarz, followed up by a post on LinkedIn, Sullivan said they were continuing to work on improving the algorithm to reward great content from small, independent publishers, but there were definitely improvements that Google could, should and wanted to be making.
Publishers creating great content but not seeing that rewarded in Google Search should not give up. Google wants you to be successful:
“And if we haven't been rewarding you as well as we should, that's part of what we hope this last update would do better on …. We want the future update to continue down that path.”
However, Sullivan cautioned that recovery after being hit by a core update was not guaranteed, and some sites might never recover previous traffic levels.
Asked specifically about the August update he said:
“I think the changes have helped some of those sites but generally have not brought those sites all the way back up to the level they were back to say last September or so.”
He said he thought some sites would continue to see good gains if they were producing good content, but said there was no going back to the previous status quo.
“But you can't predict that every site will recover to exactly where they were in September because September doesn't exist anymore.”
And our ranking systems are different, and among other things, our ranking systems are also rewarding other kind(s) of content too, including forum content and social content, because that's an important part of providing a good set of diverse results.”
Don’t obsess about small ranking improvements
Sullivan advised against making radical changes to try and gain a small improvement in your ranking position.
“If you're showing in the top results for queries, that's generally a sign that we really view your content well. Sometimes people then wonder how to move up a place or two. Rankings can and do change naturally over time. We recommend against making radical changes to try and move up a spot or two.”
Read more in Google blog post on debugging drops in Search traffic.
Feedback
After the March 2024 update Google published a feedback form which received 12,000 individual submissions representing 1,300 unique domains. Sullivan reviewed it all and prepared a write-up for the Google Search engineering team.
He said much of the feedback had been really helpful and useful, with some of it directly influencing the latest core update.
He also emphasized that submitting feedback had no effect, either positive or negative, on a site’s rankings.
“No one who submitted, by the way, got some type of recovery in Search because they submitted. Our systems don't work that way. Some sites that submitted found they've gained; some did not. Some sites that never submitted have gained, as have some sites that have never been vocal about traffic issues. But the submissions did help us, and will continue to help us, do better for all good creators.”
Google is still working through the feedback and will only open a new form when they have worked their way through the existing submissions.
Read the detailed interview on Search Engine Roundtable and the blog post on LinkedIn.
