Google’s August 2024 Core Update Arrives: What We Know

Google has just announced the long-awaited August 2024 core update. The rollout begins today and is expected to last about a month. This is the first major algorithm update from Google since the March 2024 core update which focused on identifying helpful content.

Website owners were first warned about the update in July when Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, teased its approach. Through my monitoring of SERP trackers over past months, I’m not all that surprised to see the update arrive now after seeing a steady increase in volatility from July into August.

Here’s what Google shared on the Google Search Central blog:

“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, 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.

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.”

In light of Google seeking feedback from site owners, small and independent publishers will hope to see a reverse to the negative impact of the previous helpful content updates. While we can’t know the outcome of Google’s August 2024 core update yet, I’ll continue to monitor the rollout closely and will update our newsfeed as more information trickles in.