August: vacation, beach, mountain, swimming pool... and Core Update! For years Google has accustomed us to suffer during this month, one of its major changes in the algorithm; in the same way that the summer season we have already habituated to the increasingly unbearable heat waves.
And this year, in addition, the “August 2024 Core Update” was launched on the 15th of August and ended on 9 September. It is seen that in Mountain View, California, living outside of the most deeply-rooted traditions of the Old Continent: the rest of summer.
Anyway, in Elabs -always vigilant and more on August - the news caught us by surprise. The Update came preceded by a certain amount of controversy caused by a bug in the search results that affected quite a few domains. In addition, since the end of July we were looking at some volatility in the SERPs.
According to the official documentation from Googlethis Core Update was to fix some of the changes of Update March 2024, which had been given more visibility to large publishers and brands to the detriment of smaller domains, and independent to generate useful content and value for users. We have been able to verify, for example, in some e-commerces, especially in queries brand of companies with wholesale.
Our 3 main conclusions of the August 2024 Core Update
In Elabs, after a dive in the data of the rankings of our clients and their competitors, we have selected 3 conclusions:
Local Results
To each country their king! Google is giving more visibility to local domains with a ccTLD, according to the country. The case more clear what we have seen in the domains of Spain (.is) in LATAM. In Mexico, for example, the country with the most Spanish speakers, there is a clear decline of webs “.is”, while they have increased the number of domains .mx in the first positions of the search engine. The proximity to the user is crucial to get more visibility.
Link Building
Despite rumors that the linked external had ceased to be relevant to the positioning, in Elabs, we have always considered that it is not so. Our belief was reinforced with the Google API leak at the beginning of summer. According to this documentation filtered, the value of the link is given by the traffic that this generates. With this Core Update, we have seen a clear improvement in the rankings of clients that have opted for a strategy of external links focused on generating traffic. Without forgetting the relevance between domains and the quality of the content.
User Experience
The User Experience (UX) continues to play a key role in the updates of Google, especially in those domains where abuse of advertising -even more so if it is occupying spaces, prominent above the fold, -. We can have the best content in the world, but if we prioritized the visibility of advertisements to the main content -especially on mobile - we're going wrong.
If you want to know who has been hanging medals, and who has given a hit of heat with this Core Update, we recommend the list of winners/losers, and the analysis of Sistrix.
A little bit of salseo that September is still intense for everyone, isn't it? ... See you soon!
