Hi there and welcome to a breaking news episode of SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed Dawson, your host, as usual. And yeah, today I just wanted to bring you the news that the Google Core Broad Core update for August 2024 completed yesterday, on Tuesday the 3rd of September, around about mid-afternoon UK time, so probably quite early US time. So we're now at a point where we can start to have a look and see what the results were like. So I'll talk about my own sites for the first instance and, yeah, I've had a broadly good uh update. I'd say the main sites that I care about, because obviously with anyone who's got a portfolio of sites, you know there's a few that are the ones that sort of earn you the most money or have the most traffic. They're the ones you care about the most and those those kind of core ones out of my portfolio, um, have all broadly performed well.

Um, I think in terms of traffic rises, anything between, I'd say, about 20 up to, in some cases, maybe, maybe almost 100 increase. So for those I'm quite pleased. The sites on the portfolio which aren't monetized or the ones that have lower traffic and I don't really worry about quite so much I've seen none that have had any kind of major downers. Really, I'm just scrolling through now. There's maybe I know one or two that have seen a drop, but again they're on sites that really are solo traffic or have been partly abandoned. That I don't really mind and it's kind of understandable that they went. But returning to the ones that have seen rises, yeah, some of the ones that have seen rises have been quite actively worked on and they weren't ones that had issues anyway. So it's just nice to see that that work's been rewarded.

But there's probably the one that's had the best rise and is one that I care about but had been hit. I think its traffic was probably down about 60% or 70% over the past year. It never really got hit hard by any previous Google corrupt tape, but it generally just atrophied a certain level. It was one that was still doing well and had good intent, so it was still getting traffic for keywords that were earning affiliate sales for it. But its sales had dropped, but not by as much as its traffic had dropped, if you know what I mean. So say traffic had dropped maybe 60%, 70% over the past year. Sales had maybe dropped 30%, 40%. So you know we hadn't lost all this. You know a lot of the traffic that had been lost was not high converting traffic. So you know, sometimes in those cases you don't worry so much, but this time, yeah, this one has had quite a significant bounce and it's had a good bounce in sales as well. So sales have risen.

But the interesting thing here is I'd not done anything in particular to improve that, so we don't really worked on it much for the past year. Um, I don't think we've made any particular. I'm just trying to think if we've made any. Certainly we've made no major changes. We've not done any content pruning, we've not done any content updating, we've not done any major major changes. So therefore, I don't think that there's anything that we did that sustained those increases in traffic.

And again, if I look down through some of the other in the portfolio where, yeah, I definitely have done no work on them in the past year and they've seen rises, so to me it's the gains that other people are talking about. And there have been positive noises from the affiliate community, from the niche site community for, if one's the better word, um, there have been positive noises and people saying some of their traffickers come back now. Maybe not all of it, I don't think. You know, I've not seen people doing huge dances of joy and saying they've completely recovered back to before they were hit by, maybe the HCU or other core updates, but you know they're coming back and they're now trying to analyse oh well, we did this, we did that. Is this what made the change?

Whereas I'm looking at these ones of mine which I did absolutely nothing on and they've come back to similar or possibly better levels than some of the other stories that I'm seeing people talking about I'm almost of the opinion that it's nothing that anyone actually did that improved things over that time. So, for some of the particular sites I'm looking at, I know there's been no links or no major link changes on them. I know there's been no content changes. I know there's been no structure changes there's been no real changes at all and you know they've still had traffic, some traffic on them, so people have been using them. But I wouldn't have thought any kind of particular user metrics in terms of how users are engaging with them would have actually changed much at all either. So I just to me it just looks like Google's changed the dials back a few months. You know changeds back a few months.

You know, changed it back a bit and I think, is probably coming down less harshly on certain types of sites. And again, the ones I'm talking about here are their affiliate sites. They are informational sites. They're not e-commerce sites, they're not any other. You know they're not user-generated content sites, they're not forums. These are informational sites monetized with affiliate marketing, some with ads, and you know they're not seeing any.

You know, not anything has been done significantly over that time because I've not been concentrating on them. To be honest, I've been concentrating more on keywords people use and I've been concentrating on the podcast and on some new developments, and these are not sites that I was actively trying to work on or improve or recover. So, yeah, interesting, I think that a lot of. So my impression, willing to be wrong, willing to see if other data comes out, but from the data that I see and the sites that I understand and know well, I'm thinking that this is not so much recoveries that people have done any work and any anything special to do. I think this is just google have just reversed their parameters slightly and maybe filtering a little less aggressively than they were previously. So they're just my thoughts and I will be interested to see if here anyone else's thoughts on how you've been impacted by this update, whether you've seen improvements or anything like that. If you have seen losses, you have seen improvements and you want to try and understand why that's happened.

Now is the time to go and look at it, because you can now compare data from what's changed over the past month, since August 14th off the top of my head I'll have to check it might be the 16th, but you know that mid-August, when the update started running out, to yesterday, you now know that's your period where the changes were happening and now we've got stable results now and stable traffic before. So you can now see where on your site those changes have gone, where those improvements have come or where any drops have gone. So now is the time to start going and investigating those changes. So there, I've got other episodes on the podcast. I just have a look around on the episode list. There's definitely some episodes where I talk more detail about how to analyze your traffic after a Google update. So yeah, anyway, do let me know any input, any views, any thoughts you've got on this. I'd love to hear them and until next time, take care.