What's changing this time around
Who this update will impact the most
What to do during the rollout
As per usual, there's not much more to do than just wait out the effects of the Core update on your sites. Though there were a few things that did peak my interest:
- John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, has again emphasised the importance of what he calls ‘original content’. Looking at you, ChatGPT landing page creators… 👀
- Over the past few weeks the SERPs have been quite volatile, with a lot of weird, inexplicable fluctuations and outages. It seems that Google is working on more stuff under the hood of their flagship product than they're letting on.
What to do when you get hit
You got hit! Now what? Well, about time that you started working on creating some fresh, actually helpful, content. We've all seen them before, but let's put the most important content quality factors in a list for you again:
- Consider the reader: make sure that your content is written with your users in mind. What is your reader looking for, what questions drive them, why are they looking for these answers in the first place?
- Make sure your content is original: Google doesn't like regurgitated content, and honestly, neither does your audience! If you're just going to repeat the different pointers that the competition already wrote about, without adding any input or insight of your own, you're better off not writing anything at all.
- Focus on quality, not on speed: Sloppiness is spelling errors are bad… for users AND for your rankings! Yes, Google cares about spelling and grammar, so let's hope that you paid attention back in school.
- Google recognizes authority: Google cares about who is producing your blogs, guides, cases, and pages alike! Use structured data for your author profiles and start building up some nice authority for the authors in your company. And yes, Google does some basic background checking if people actually exist, so con't go making up any AI writers my friends.
Conclusion
The key takeaways from this core update as of now:
- August Core update will take about four weeks to roll out.
- Small publishers will most likely see a (small) uplift if they lost a significant amount of traffic.
- Keep calm, and produce high-expertise content!