Time to read: 3 minutes
It has been a busy month for Google! Here’s an overview of what you may have missed if you’ve been out of the loop:
- In early August, during the anti-trust trial of the Department of Justice vs. Google, a judge ruled that the tech giant had illegally monopolized online search and advertising markets.
- Then, a few days later on August 15, Google announced the August broad core update, noting that the update is bigger than most, and that it would take at least a month to roll out
- The following day, Google shared that there was an unknown bug that was impacting ranking. Representatives refrained from sharing any more details, but they claimed that the bug had nothing to do with the core update. Ultimately, it took nearly 5 days to fix the issue.
- Lastly, as of August 20, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the class action lawsuit from Chrome users who stated that Google collected personal information without their permission.
What Is the Point of This Core Update?
According to Google, the update is being released for the following reasons:
“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.”
Mixed Reactions to the Update
While some marketers were excited to see another update come through, in hopes that it would help their websites recover from previous Helpful Content Updates, others were not as pleased considering what they are seeing so far in their data. Examples of each below:
That’s Not All – Google Updated Their Documentation Too
With the release of this core update, Google also made changes to their official documentation, adding and removing specific language.
Here is an interesting tidbit that was removed, courtesy of some digging from Marie Haynes:
“There might be nothing wrong with pages that may not be performing as well as they were before a core update. They haven’t violated our spam policies, nor been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those policies. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better in search results.”
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