How the August 2024 Google Core Update Affected SEO

Google finished its second core update of the year at the beginning of September. This core update, which began to roll out in August of 2024 took 19 total days to complete, which is, while still on the long side, much shorter than the other big update this year. The March 2024 core update took an unprecedented 45 days to fully roll out.

So now that the August update has finished and we’ve had some time to look at how it affected the SEO landscape, is there anything that you should know?

What Did the August 2024 Core Updated Change?

According to Google’s own announcementabout the update, it was designed to improve the algorithm’s ability to match users with the best possible content. The ultimate goal was to show more content that was genuinely interesting and useful to searchers rather than content that was created specifically to rank on the search engine results page (SERP). The update also took into account feedback from smaller creators, who had complained that their quality content wasn’t able to compete as well even though it was relevant.

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White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO

The battle between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO has been ongoing since the dawn of Google. There have always been creators who create content with the intent of gaming the search engines. These tactics, called black hat SEO, worked back in the dark ages of Google but Google quickly released the Panda Update, which completely overhauled the search algorithm to reward sites that prioritized user experience and punish those that utilized user-unfriendly tactics like keyword stuffing to prioritize the search engine rankings.

While black hat SEO looks very different now than it did back in the early days of Google, it still exists. Any SEO technique that puts the search engine over users can qualify as black hat; it may not look like keyword stuffing anymore because that no longer works but it’s evolved along with Google. Google’s goal is to match users with the best possible results, so prioritizing users and providing them with genuinely useful content can help future-proof your SEO because that’s the kind of content that Google is continually refining its algorithm to prioritize. This latest update is no exception.

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AI Pricing Smaller Creators Out of SEO

Earlier this year, we wondered whether smaller creators who couldn’t afford to pay to play in the Google SERP landscape were getting priced out of SEO. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones concerned that those with smaller budgets weren’t going to be able to compete and Google received feedback from those smaller businesses and individuals who felt that their content wasn’t ranking as well as it ought to, given the quality of the content. This update aims to address that and give smaller creators a chance to rank; before, larger creators would be seen as more authoritative simply because they had the resources and name recognition to garner backlinks that smaller creators wouldn’t.

What Results Did Creators See After the Update?

SEMRush reported that a majority of its users saw changes in their rankings, whether good or bad. Most saw some decreases in rankings, although many did see increases as well. Google’s advice for what to do if your rankings drop is to revisit your content strategy to make sure that you’re creating the highest possible quality of content, namely following Google’s EEAT guidelines. We’ve been advising for years to put your users first rather than search engines and we stand by that advice.