Google August 2024 Core Update: winners and losers
“Oops, Google did it again,” we might say paraphrasing Britney Spears. Once again this year, as is now “tradition,” the Search giant launched an algorithmic update in the middle of August, which disturbed or at least threatened the vacation season of SEOs and webmasters. In fact, the impact of this August 2024 Core Update does not seem to have been that violent, nor do the claims of Google, which had spoken of an intervention launched (also) to help sites that had lost rankings and traffic with previous updates, appear confirmed. Thanks to our SEOZoom Observatory, we analyzed quite a bit of data and sites: so here are our thoughts on the winners and losers of Google’s August 2024 Core Update.
Google’s August 2024 Core Update: the general information
Google’s August 2024 Core Update was launched on August 15, 2024 and officially ended on September 3, completing a rollout that lasted a total of 19 days.
Initially, Google’s announcement projected that the entire process could take up to a month, but it actually finished more quickly than expected, so that the update was completed in less than three weeks.
During this period, the search engine experienced the usual fluctuations in rankings, with a variable and sometimes unpredictable impact for different sectors, confirming how complex and articulated a core update of this magnitude can be. Despite the shorter timeline than originally expected, the update still left its mark on several sites, reconfiguring the dynamics of the SERPs.
What Google told us about the August 2024 update.
The update launched exactly on August Ferragosto is the second core update of 2024. As on previous occasions, Google’s public voices shared some information to clarify the purpose of the intervention and outline what the SEO industry should expect.
Since the launch, John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, has provided details on the official blog and through the company’s social channels, explaining what prompted Google to release this update. In particular, he emphasized Google’s intention to make search results more useful for ordinary users. “This update,” Mueller said, ”is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of search results by showing more content that people actually find useful and less content that looks like it’s just made to achieve good performance on Search. With this sentence, Mueller highlighted one of the primary needs now entrenched in the Google ecosystem: balancing quality with accessibility of information.
So far, nothing particularly different or extraordinary compared to classic core updates-which serve precisely to improve the overall qualit