Changes from March Core Update to August Core Update
One big question many of us in the SEO industry had was what were the big changes made by Google between the March 2024 core update and the most recent August 2024 core update. Google told us initially that the March core update was one of there largest updates, and many of us expected to see sites hit hard by the September 2023 helpful content update would see changes there but most, if not all, did not see any improvements. Then with the August core update, we did see some minimal movement there, so what changed?
Sullivan wasn’t able to tell me about any specific changes, instead he said there were “regular incremental kind of changes we seek to do,” he told me. What does that mean? “Like you do a core update, you look at different ranking systems, you try to understand how to make them better, you test them, you experiment with them and ultimately you send them out to human raters who go through and say yes, we think that's improved the search results overall and we push those updates out,” Sullivan said as he took me through the process.
Nothing is perfect, as Sullivan explained, so you go through the process again and “do further evaluations further testing and you try to look at different things and see how to make those better,” he told me. But one of those things was to look at how to do better with great “smaller independent sites.” In fact, he said “we have made some changes that we think are helping there.”
But he said Google is not done with those changes, more improvements in those areas will come with future core updates.
When I questioned Google’s efforts on some of those smaller and independent sites, Sullivan agreed that some of those are “really good sites, they're producing good content,” he said. “We want them to do well and search as well,” he added. The action Google is taking is to “keep adjusting the ranking systems to reward that kind of content, which is ultimately the goal,” he added.
So it seems like Google’s efforts from the March core update to the August core update was to reward more of these smaller and independent publishers and Google is far from done, so expect more there with future core updates.