Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, welcome to this quick emergency podcast, because today Google have announced that they have launched their August 2024 core update. This is rolling out now. It started out just before. Well, they announced it, I should say just before 8am Pacific time, which is about 4pm UK time where I am. They've put some guidance up about what the core update's about and they specifically say that they've taken into account the feedback they've heard from some creators and others over the past few months, where they are aiming 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, and that this is an area that they will continue to address in future updates. And they say this update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made so they can continue to show the best of the web. So this sounds like almost that they seem to be maybe the effects of the helpful content update last September that they may be trying to address some of the issues that the community has been saying about how badly these kind of sites have been affected. So time will tell. Obviously, it's very early days, as we've got so little data at the moment to be able to say anything. So, but it's interesting that they have said that in their actual blog post about it. I'll put a link to this blog post and all the other things I'll talk about in the show notes. They've also updated their help page about core updates, where they give some in-depth guidance for those um who may have seen changes when an update runs through, and a key thing from that is um which I agree with them on is that they for the first step is always to confirm the core update is finished running at before you start trying to do any deep analysis. Now the status dashboard for this core update says the roll-up. The roll-up may take up to a month to complete, so it's going to take a long time. They're going to wait to see exactly what happens.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Now my advice, my advice to you if you've been hit by this update, whether positively or negatively, is if it's a negative, do not panic, do not make changes, do not try and work anything out until the effects have rolled through, until there's more data from other people, until we've got a lot more as a community that we can see what kind of sites have been hit and what kind of results are rolling through. So yeah, I know it's difficult. I've been there before. I've been hit really badly by updates in the past. It is incredibly demoralizing if it happens to you.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Key thing is don't panic, don't think straight away, because I've been seeing people get hit at the start of a core update rolling out. Then, as the rollout happens and rolls through, they'll sometimes change the dials basically on these, on these updates, and you may find that it rolls back in a way that can positively bring you back to where you were or at least negate some of the impact that was against you. So you just have to take a deep breath and just watch and see what happens. So I and people will be watching this roll up very closely. Anything that we see happen, anything I can share as soon as stuff becomes obvious from if there's any, any key takeaways that starts to become apparent, I will share in future podcasts. So do watch this space and it'll keep you updated as much as we can. Yeah, so in the meantime, yeah, just don't panic, just keep an eye out and watch what happens.