How the August 2024 Core Update has affected us
August: vacations, beaches, mountains, pools… and a Core Update! For years, Google has had us used to facing one of its major algorithm changes during this month, just as summer has us used to increasingly unbearable heatwaves.
And this year, the "August 2024 Core Update" was launched on August 15th and concluded on September 9th. It seems that in Mountain View, California, they are unbothered to the deeply rooted traditions of the Old Continent: summer breaks.
In any case, at Elabs—always vigilant, especially in August—the news didn’t catch us by surprise. The update was preceded by some controversy due to a bug in search results that affected quite a few domains. Moreover, by the end of July, we had already noticed some volatility in the SERPs.
According to Google’s official documentation, this Core Update was intended to correct some changes from the March 2024 Update, which gave more visibility to large publishers and brands to the detriment of smaller, independent domains that provide useful and valuable content to users. We have seen this, for example, in some e-commerce sites, particularly in brand queries for companies with wholesale models.
Our 3 main conclusions from the August 2024 Core Update
At Elabs, after diving into the ranking data of our clients and their competitors, we’ve selected three conclusions:
Local Results
Every country has its king! Google is giving more visibility to local domains with ccTLDs that match the country. The clearest example has been observed with Spanish domains (.es) in Latin America. In Mexico, for instance, the country with the most Spanish speakers, there has been a noticeable decline in ".es" websites, while the number of ".mx" domains in the top positions of the search results has increased. Proximity to the user is now essential to gaining more visibility.
Link Building
Despite rumors that external linking had stopped being relevant for ranking, at Elabs, we’ve always believed otherwise. Our conviction was reinforced by the "Google API leak" earlier this summer. According to this leaked documentation, the value of a link is determined by the traffic it generates. With this Core Update, we’ve seen a clear improvement in the rankings of clients who have focused on an external link strategy aimed at generating traffic, without neglecting domain relevance and content quality.
User Experience
User Experience (UX) continues to play a key role in Google’s updates, especially for domains that overuse ads—particularly if they occupy prominent "above the fold" spaces. We may have the best content in the world, but if we prioritize ad visibility over the main content—especially on mobile—we’re heading in the wrong direction.
If you want to know who’s earned medals and who’s suffered a heat stroke from this Core Update, we recommend checking out Sistrix’s winners/losers list and analysis.
A little bit of drama to make September more exciting for everyone, right? … See you in soon!