The Google August 2024 core update finished rolling out yesterday at around 3 pm ET. It took over 19 days and four hours to roll out, starting on August 15th at 11 am and finishing on September 3rd at 3 pm. The update was expected to take a month but this Google algorithm update ended up taking less than 3 weeks to roll out.
Google posted the update over here saying, “The rollout was complete as of September 3, 2024.”
When Google announced this update, they said, “latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months.” “This update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to surface the best of the web,” Google added. This includes “small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content on relevant searches,” Google wrote.
Did We See Improvements
Did it? Well, we did for the time since the September 2023 helpful content update see some sites move up and see ranking improvements. We actually saw small adjustments early on and while some of those vanished, some continued to surge on.
Overall, it seemed like most sites were worse off, at least, from an SEO perspective. The poll results showed:
- 44% had rankings/traffic drops
- 27% had rankings/traffic increases
- 29% had no change
And while some sites saw improvements after being hit by the helpful content update, most did not. Of those that did, only some saw really big improvements, like full recoveries, but most of those saw minimal gains compared to their positions prior to the September helpful content update. The rest stayed the same are now worse off.
Google August 2024 Core Update Quick Facts:
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
