August 2024 Core Update - Anyone Else Shaking Their Head?

[codyecp]

Preface: I own an agency that focuses only on dental clients

Curious if anyone else is scratching their heads after this new update? We spent the last 6 months reinventing how we created localized content for clients, pushing for quality photography/imagery, uniquely written longer form content, that answered more questions relevant to a KW search topic. We spent countless hours focusing on showcasing expertise, testimonials and focusing on addressing personal experiences.

We're now worse off across the board after the August update, generally falling 2-5 spots for our primary KW targets per page. Only to see that our clients are outranked by 100-200 words of repurposed content, stock heavy imagery and just all around bad/bogus content from less qualified "experts."

Now I'm shaking my head, left wondering if:

1. Content written for search engines doesn't rank well AND...
2. Content written for actual people doesn't rank well AND...
3. Unique experiential content written by experts doesn't rank well BUT...
4. Horrible half-ass stock heavy cookie-cutter content does rank again now...
5. What in the heck are we actually supposed to be doing as marketers anymore?!?!

Would love to hear other's thoughts from the same or different industries, verticals, niches etc. on their thoughts, and if you like the August Core Update.

Anyone seeing similar things? Has anyone who put in effort seeing gains from those efforts?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Are you looking at organic or local pack traffic?

 

[codyecp]

Are you looking at organic or local pack traffic?

Organic

 

[codyecp]

Organic

And strictly talking local businesses (in dentistry). There were no crazy fluctuations in March, but this last one oddly knocked most of our clients out of the top 3 results organically.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

We've had some similar struggles in the urgent care clinic industry. Not as severe as yours, but nonetheless very frustrating. For us, it is very localized. We use the same strategy, with unique well-crafted content, custom photography, highly optimized on-page SEO, etc., in numerous cities/regions and it works exceptionally well.

But fairly recently, in a couple of cities we have dropped out of top 4 ranking for the primary KW. It has proven difficult to improve/regain ranking and are outranked by extremely thin-content competitor webpages. Granted, most of the competitors are very well-established brands in those locations, but we have similar competition in other markets where our clients rank very well. We are doing some testing with an approach of "less is more" in those markets to really dial-in specifically on the primary KW (urgent care) and de-emphasize the other KWs and depending on the outcome, we may make that page the GBP website page to see if there is further organic improvement. We have existing service pages for other money KW's that rank very well, so there should be little harm in our attempts to regain or improve our overall ranking. Our theory, while not proven at this point, is placing too much emphasis on other keywords (on a single page, in this case the home page) may be diluting the importance of the primary KW, at least in those markets. We also want to put renewed emphasis on quality citations/backlinks, but we aren't doing all of these changes simultaneously because we want to be able to measure any incremental ranking improvements. We'll see what happens.

 

[codyecp]

Hi Jeff,

I would definitely be curious of your findings. What I'm seeing on a lot of service based (interior) pages of the websites, is that they're outranked by thin content with no real quality or substance. They also aren't using a Geo with their KW's within on-page optimizations quite often. They also tend to start content with questions and answers within the content right away. So instead of any kind of overview of the business, expertise, etc. they just jump straight into QA of some sort.

Other times I'm finding homepages that outrank clients with poorly written, thin content, nothing that showcases EEAT, and all use stock heavy imagery (maybe easier to identify by Google?). The modified published dates/time stamps however, are far more recent than our clients in almost all cases.

Doing some testing on interior service page content, and altering modified time dates (both with & without changes to content) to see if that has an impact. Will report findings if things move.

 

[JS Girard]

If HCU is indeed brand based per some analyses, and it has now been applied to everything, then it makes sense that suddenly thin-content high-visibility brands start overtaking small players in the local playing field too. because that's exactly what the HCUs did to many review websites vs. major brands.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

If HCU is indeed brand based per some analyses, and it has now been applied to everything, then it makes sense that suddenly thin-content high-visibility brands start overtaking small players in the local playing field too. because that's exactly what the HCUs did to many review websites vs. major brands.

That is a very valid point, and is a concern. To me, it smells very similar to what happened in the past two years with "near me" related searches for specific industries and KWs, dramatically impacting local intent searches but the organic results are/were often useless because many results are/were not locally relevant and favored brands over local relevance. In our personal experience, Google will selectively reduce the SERP visibility of specific industries and keywords, like medical, which then forces those verticals/industries to increase their PPC budgets for paid visibility versus non-paid organic visibility. So, while Google says that your PPC budget/spending doesn't directly impact organic ranking, Google does have the ability to impact organic visibility across the board, which can impact businesses use of PPC.

 

[codyecp]

If HCU is indeed brand based per some analyses, and it has now been applied to everything, then it makes sense that suddenly thin-content high-visibility brands start overtaking small players in the local playing field too. because that's exactly what the HCUs did to many review websites vs. major brands.

For our clients, I'm talking about single office, one owner businesses (dental offices). The only equivalent of anything related in the dental industry of a "big brand" would be like an Aspen Dental, Clear Choice or possibly a "Comfort Dental." Some form of a large DSO (private equity group). Even then, I'm never seeing an Aspen Dental or equivalent outrank our clients in large markets where they are present.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

@codyecp: When you implemented these changes, were there any changes made to any of the following:

1. Hosting
2. Platform (e.g. WordPress (WP) to Wix, new WP theme/framework)
3. Caching/Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Just wanted to cover all the bases.

 

[codyecp]

Not really. They've all been hosted on the same fast hosting platform, always Wordpress, never really needed a CDN. There are different levels of caching going on to speed up Wordpress, but Google's page cache has always looked good.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I noticed one big shakeup for a dentist client of mine, but it was the local pack that shifted a lot - not organic. I found the businesses that gained a lot were 2 big competitors that have a much larger volume of reviews than anyone else in that town, and lots of foot traffic (via popular times graphs on their knowledge panel).

 

[codyecp]

I noticed one big shakeup for a dentist client of mine, but it was the local pack that shifted a lot - not organic. I found the businesses that gained a lot were 2 big competitors that have a much larger volume of reviews than anyone else in that town, and lots of foot traffic (via popular times graphs on their knowledge panel).

I've noticed some clients that weren't actively pursuing reviews and had a low quantity of them (nothing fresh) also saw some significant drops in local rankings.

Are you thinking that the Core update significantly impacted Maps in any way?

 

[JoyHawkins]

I usually see core updates impact maps, but not for every client.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Are you seeing their traffic down as well as rankings? I was looking at a dentist yesterday and traffic, but the only hit I was seeing was on the local pack side.

I saw another post in a Facebook group about a home services business tanking with this update. So far, small businesses have been pretty immune to the last wave of core updates.

 

[mylittleloveheart]

We have had the same issue - in search dropping an average of 3-8 positions across the board. I feel the algorithm targeted over-optimised pages. Where we did little to no optimising on a page the average position remained the same. But where we have keywords in the heading and unnecessary fluff content the average position dropped. This is just my feeling. The map pack seemed to stay the same. We are in retail shopping.

 

[dynasty]

Can you share an example of your pages? I find when people talk about "great content," they're often meaning overly optimized, fluffy content.

 

[Collabo]

While it is great to keep up with algorithm updates, I have always found that it is best to stay the course and try not to over-react. If you produce good content (helpful, trustworthy and keyword rich), know technical SEO and stick to your strategy, you will usually come out on top in the long run as long as you are consistent. I have helped other agencies and watched them make massive changes after they saw a rankings drop and spoke with their upset client. Sometimes those changes end up making things worse than if they did nothing and just rode it out.

August was a classic example of some big swings and then corrections (even if you made no changes to a site). I prefer to do smaller iterations over time (instead of massive changes), so you get a better understanding of what is making the difference.

 

[JoyHawkins]

This one was fun lol

 

[codyecp]

This one was fun lol

Very interesting and this kind of relates to some updates on our end. We rode it out with all clients who weren't breathing down our necks. Many of our clients saw no significant change. The ones that dipped, rebounded slightly, but haven't retaken the #1 spots. Most went from top 3 to dropping 2-6 spots, then back up 2-3 spots.

I'm kind of with @littleloveheart on the over optimization thing. We used to contract with a great copywriter who wrote most of our client content. We've since brought the content in house, and it's slightly stuffed with the same target KW in H2's throughout the page. The client sites that yoyo'd (mostly) were the slightly stuffed sites. I've made some changes to our processes in the past 2 weeks, with a focus on humanized over any AI generated content (shortcuts), removing any (quote on quote) 'unnatural' stuffing, and actually shortening the length of copy in general. I've always placed an emphasis on human written content for actual humans, but it's a big emphasis on that. Google is now VERY good at figuring out what resonates with humans, beyond algorithmically.

We've also gone through some of those sites this week and rewritten / removed some of that "over" optimization. Really looking forward to reporting back on those results.

Side note: @Joy, if that's a dental office, 83K visitors in that span is amazing!