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]

No, that one is a lawyer

 

[Invalley]

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.

Great steps and excellent insight. If Google is indeed getting systematically better at spotting fluffy content, then a lot of websites are going to suffer. But that would lead to positive results in the long term. I feel like I've been seen more and more "normal" people complain about the quality of Google search results in the last couple of years, and a lot of that is due to websites writing content for the algorithm, instead of writing for humans.

The problem is, of course, exactly what signals Google is using to determine all that. Like you said, some of your clients lost ranks to thin and fluffy websites, right? I've heard similar reports from other frustrated webmasters.

 

[codyecp]

Great steps and excellent insight. If Google is indeed getting systematically better at spotting fluffy content, then a lot of websites are going to suffer. But that would lead to positive results in the long term. I feel like I've been seen more and more "normal" people complain about the quality of Google search results in the last couple of years, and a lot of that is due to websites writing content for the algorithm, instead of writing for humans.

The problem is, of course, exactly what signals Google is using to determine all that. Like you said, some of your clients lost ranks to thin and fluffy websites, right? I've heard similar reports from other frustrated webmasters.

So yes, some clients lost ranks to thin and fluffy websites. Other clients (from the best we can decipher so far) lost rank due to their own "fluffy" content, but not really 'thin' content IMO. As I mentioned, we've adjusted some content to be very human-centric.

I agree on Google search results within the last couple of years, and most people I know share this view. I often wonder whether semantic related algos have caused a conundrum on Google search results not quite being able to answer a very specific question, or whether that's purposeful: Creating the need for multiple searches within a single session, by partly answering a question (more searches = more ad views = more revenue).

 

[JoyHawkins]

@codyecp for the clients that lost organic rankings in August, how are their local pack rankings looking? I've had more time to look at the changes from this update, and I'm seeing some of the same patterns you are.

 

[Jannell Howell]

The agency I work in also specializes in dentists. A colleague was testing 'content pruning' as well as strategic internal linking and it seemed to help. Perhaps it relates to the indexing capability/speed of the Search Console?