If you’re concerned about the update, don’t miss this month’s roundup. It’s packed with news, analysis from the community, and more.
Our top stories for the month include Google’s official announcement about the end of the update and some further analysis from SEOs revealing how the update hit them. After that, you’ll learn from a series of studies covering optimal numbers of pages and how sites are recovering from the HCU.
There’s plenty more great news you shouldn’t miss after that. You’ll learn from Google announcements covering AVIF, find out how sites dominate Google’s Top Stories Feature, look at the evidence that Google favors quality over quantity, and more.
Let’s jump in, starting at the end of the big update.
Google August 2024 Core Update Rollout Is Now Complete
https://searchengineland.com/google-august-2024-core-update-rollout-is-now-complete-446225
Barry Schwartz brings you this announcement from Google confirming that, after 19 days of changes, the Core Update that started on August 15th is now officially complete as of September 3. You’re not alone if you’ve noticed a significant amount of volatility.
As Barry points out, this was no ordinary update. It followed a large amount of criticism by small publishers, SEOs, and other parties over the negative impacts of recent updates. It is expected to address many of those issues (later, you can read more about what SEOs are seeing).
Google was direct about its goals in a recent statement. They said—
“This latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months…we aim to connect people with a range of high-quality sites, including ‘small’ or ‘“’ independent’ sites…This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates.”
Remember that your data may not be completely reliable. A search ranking bug affected the first four days of the update.
If you want to know what Google says about recovering from updates, you can find recently updated guidance here.
If you want to see some real data about how sites are improving, there’s a video coming up in the roundup you shouldn’t miss. Before that, you may want to see some of the freshest surge charts covering the Core Update period.
Google August Core Update Helpful Content Surge Charts
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-august-core-update-helpful-content-surge-charts-37970.html
Barry Schwartz brings you this piece about the full effects of the recent update, as measured by a series of SEO tools. He provides you with an educational series of charts that illustrates the impact as several top SEOs experienced it on their sites.
He covers a set of charts that Glenn Gabe provided. These charts record some seismic movement, with significant visibility and organic traffic changes. Glenn says 73 of his 390+ HCU-affected sites have surged. Some of them experienced complete reversals of earlier losses.
Other SEOs like Lily Ray and Marie Haynes also reported significant surges. The graphs included in this piece cover several of their sites, including one that saw close to a 300% increase in organic traffic.
Check out the entire piece to learn more about the immediate impact of the update. That knowledge will pair nicely with the next top piece. You’ll get a longer-term view of Google’s strategy through some research into how they are changing how they reward content.
[New SEO Study] Fewer Pages = More Traffic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAYtX5mHNfo
Mark Webster of Authority Hacker brings you this breakdown of some recent research by Kevin Indig. That research revealed a surprising trend: That there is an inverse correlation between an increase in index pages and organic traffic growth. To put it simply: pages spike, and traffic drops.
Kevin’s research, which you can find here, covered years of trends that have been building to this point. According to his estimate, Google has begun to favor fewer pieces of high-quality content over the sheer volume of content since the 2023 core update.
As Mark points out, this research raises some big questions about how Google’s perception of topical authority has changed. They may be already working toward an algorithm that will punish behavior that was rewarded even a few short years ago.
Kevin noted some other big trends as part of his analysis. For one, he noted that user-generated content from places like Reddit had been given a lot of visibility, which once belonged to small sites.
He theorizes that Google may be changing these rules due to its own need for quality content. By decreasing the incentive for sites to “mass” content, Google would enjoy more human-generated content to train its ******.
Kevin provided many real-life examples of these new preferences in action. He found one isolated case of a site that doubled its page index quickly due to a bug. The response from Google, in this case, was a sharp and sudden drop.
He also provides an example of a wide-scale programmatic strategy by a business that led to a 50% drop in organic traffic. Check out the complete research for more data and demonstrations of Google’s new policy. Also, check out the rest of the video for more insights about the update.
Next, you’ll learn what I’ve learned about how sites are recovering from HCU and what problems they solved to achieve recovery.
Sites Are Recovering From HCU! Here’s What They Did…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFK2bULRKPI
I’m bringing you this look at the massive recovery of money sites like guitarchalk.com, HouseFresh.com, and thatfitfriend.com.
All of these sites addressed a handful of problems, but I argue that what mattered most in every case was that they removed low-quality pages from their sites. You might say these sites have already reacted to what Kevin predicted in the last piece. Let’s look at how it went for them.
The first site, guitarchalk.com, nuked almost a quarter of its total content before recovering. I argue that there is a new ranking factor at play. It works like this: When a website has a high percentage of pages with low or zero traffic, Google considers that a red flag.
I also argue that it’s not a big secret why they would do this. Google has to contend with 5 million new blog posts a day. They aren’t trying to analyze every word of that; they just want to look at the most efficient big signals. I think they’ve found one that satisfied them, and I think I figured out how it works.
This new signal might have first been hinted at in recent update documentation. There, Google mentioned a new site-wide signal that would be joining other existing ones. Other documents call it a page-level signal, but I can at least confirm it landed sitewide on my sites.
In a later passage, Google admits that removing unhelpful content can improve the rankings of the rest of your content.
Other SEOs and I have worked on several methods to optimize for this signal, and I share them with you in the video. I cover James Dooley’s method as well as my own. This is a detailed process where you’ll learn how to create sheets you need to organize everything, as well as instructions on how to relink your pages properly.
Next, there’s even more news from Google. AVIF is now supported in Google Search.
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/08/happy-avifriday?hl=en
This announcement by Google may have some serious implications for image-search-based SEO. The AVIF file format, one of the most commonly used on the internet, is now a supported file type. All of them should be properly indexed on Google without any further work or action on your part.
As the report explains, AVIF is an open image file format based on the AV1 video compression standard. This format is already supported on all web browsers, a variety of platforms, and many online services.
Google does not recommend that you make any changes to your images as part of this announcement. You should think carefully before changing your images to other formats, and consider your visitor experience.
They provided a guide to image SEO if you have any more questions. Next, you’re ready to jump into some fresh research covering how SEOs are winning Google’s Top Stories feature.
The Sites Dominating Google’s Top Stories SERP Feature in 2024
https://detailed.com/top-stories/
Glen Allsopp brings you this look at how 1000 prominent domains have managed to account for more than 97% of all listings in Top Stories. Before he begins, Glen lets us know that in many of the independent sites covered for this research, certain details were withheld to protect the strategies involved.
The big question that Glen wanted to ask was: Are any young sites performing well in Google’s Top Stories SERP feature? To find out, he checked the domain registration dates for all 1000 sites. He then broke down the young and independent sites that made it into the list and examined their properties.
He takes you through each site, one by one, looking at factors such as how much traffic they get from Top Stories, how many visitors they get, and other interesting facts.
Glen also asks, “Is anyone on this list who doesn’t deserve it?” He examines whether any sites seem to be sneaking in without meeting the quality levels of other Top Stories sites. His research team found only three sites that were united by the common problems:
Lacking a logo- Broken about-page links
- Clearly AI-generated authors
- Constant SEO and clickbait-focused headlines
All other sites in the list seemed to be credible, which suggests effective quality control on Google’s part. Check out the entire list to get a better idea of how your site could appear in Top Stories and what that might be worth to you.
Next, Google has another announcement covering both Updates and the growing world of AI. Google confirms that AI overviews are affected by Core Updates.
Confirmed: Google AI Overviews Are Impacted by Core Updates
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-overviews-core-updates-37933.html
The Search Engine Roundtable team brings you this look at how updates may be affecting the AI overviews produced from your site content. The question of whether your site appears in Google AI overviews seems to be reevaluated every time a new core update arrives.
As the writers point out, Google has claimed in the past that quality is a benchmark for appearing in AI overviews. Many other featured snippets have been shown to be impacted updates in the past.
SEOs have noticed this trend before. Glen Gabe previously wrote about it when it hit one of his sites. He claimed that when the core update hit his sites, the number of times they appeared in AI overviews was also immediately affected.
The attention from SEOs prompted a personal response from John Mueller, who confirmed the movement in a recent discussion. For our last piece of the month, you’ll learn more about the Discover policy violations that are attracting manual actions.
Google Issues Manual Actions Over Google Discover Policy Violations
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discover-policy-violations-37978.html
Barry Schwartz brings you this look at a number of manual actions that Google has taken in the last few days, targeting SEOs ranking on the Discover search feature. In this case, Google notified several site owners.
Barry was able to get a screenshot of one of the emails that went out. The example targeted what it called “Misleading Content.” Several SEOs responded on Twitter with as many as 7 sites targeted at the same time.
These actions follow recent stories of Discover traffic dropping all over the place. This may be the start of a new policy from Google that will change how Discover operates. If there is any update on this situation, you can read about it in an upcoming roundup!
