Google August 2024 Core Update: Key Changes and Impacts

Google launched its core updates on the 15th of August and marked another step in its ongoing mission to refine search results. This Google August 2024 Core Update is the second core update launched by Google in 2024, the March 2024 core update being the first one. This update continued to focus on promoting independent websites and publishers having good quality content and demoting websites with low-value SEO-first content. In an X post, Google posted, “Today we released the August 2024 core update. It continues 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.” John Muller, the search advocate at Google Switzerland wrote, “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,”

What is Google Core Update?

Google Core Update is unlike Google’s general updates, these updates change how Google decides which websites are the most useful and relevant for different searches. The updates are a result of Google’s ultimate goal to improve the quality of search results so that when someone searches something on the search bar, google can provide exactly what they are looking for with ease.

Google August Update: Insights on the core updates

Google Core Update emphasizes the importance of relevant and quality content. A well-written content that is relevant to the target audience will be given preference. Thin content that fails to offer substantial value to users will not be given an inclination. The E-A-T: Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are crucial factors in Google Updates. Websites with strong expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are likelier to perform better. Websites will need to update their content to include more references and citations from authoritative sources. This Google update has also focused on the importance of user experience. Elements like page load time, mobile usability, and the overall ease of navigating your site, that ensure a positive user experience should be taken care of.

The recent update showed Google’s algorithms are continuing to evolve with AI and machine learning. As more and more website content is being created with the help of AI, the quality of the content has begun to be compromised. This Google Core Update has improved its ability to detect content that’s been generated by AI, especially the ones that are low quality and might lead to a poor reader experience. This is a big update as websites that rely greatly on AI and don’t bother to make sure the content they provide is of quality, might see their rankings drop. Another big announcement was their improvement in local searches. Google has improved its local searches by giving more weight to businesses that are nearby and have a s