July 18, 2024
Before we dive into specifics, let’s first examine at exactly what Sullivan said in a comment on the popular blog seroundtable.com. Here, he left a comment saying the following:
“We’d tell you when the next core update will be if we knew. But we don’t know exactly yet, that’s all. These aren’t scheduled to a particular day. The ranking team makes changes, tests those, evaluates those and eventually we get a launch date. There have been many times I could have said “Core update next week!” because everything was on track for that to happen, but then there’s a need to do a bit more work or other things that might cause a pushback. I would expect we’ll see one in the coming weeks, because that fits in with our general cycle. But precisely when, that’s just not known yet.”
Danny Sullivan on seroundtable.com
As to what changes we might see, Sullivan added:
“I do hope we can improve in some of these cases where creators with their hearts in the right places, and who are doing the real content effort behind that, are rewarded as we should be doing.”
Interestingly, Sullivan also added that he’d interviewed people from HouseFresh and RetroDodo in front of about 50 Google Search Quality team members, so the Google team “could hear first-hand directly some of the things that they’ve had relayed from me, John or which they’ve read about” he wrote. “It was incredibly useful, impactful, and I’m deeply grateful for both of those for agreeing to do it” he added.
According to Google, the last core update (the March 2024 core update) was the company’s biggest and most powerful in recent memory. Although since then there have been several ‘unconfirmed updates’ spotted by the SEO community on Twitter and elsewhere, but nothing official has come from Google.
With this in mind, here’s a list of the Google core updates we’ve seen since 2023:
Prior to this, we also saw the following updates between 2022 and 2021:
On top of this, it’s also important to keep in mind that ‘core updates’ aren’t the only changes that Google makes to its systems. For example, we also recently saw the June 2024 spam update roll out.
Many marketers, webmasters and business owners will be hoping that the next core update (whether it lands in July or August) will lead to recoveries for sites that were penalised by the September 2023 helpful content update.
Almost a year later, almost every site that has undertaken remedial works after being hit by this update has not seen any form of recovery at all. Yes, it’s true that many sit owners were hoping to see improvements in March (when the last update rolled out), but these recoveries never materialised.
Unfortunately, for now, it’s unclear whether the same fate will befall these site owners again. But hopefully the news that Sullivan has met with people from HouseFresh and RetroDodo (two big losers since the September 2023 update) shows that Google is taking concerns about the algorithm from the SEO community and site owners seriously.
No matter whether you’re a marketer or a website owner, these are fascinating times. After all, in the last 12 months, we’ve seen just how impactful Google’s core updates can be. While some sites have seen terrific surges, others have disappeared from the SERPs entirely and have been subjected to incredibly damaging manual actions.
One thing is for certain, if you’ve taken part in so-called ‘black hat’ SEO tactics. Now is the time to stop. If you’d like an audit of your current organic search position, a review of your content or advice about how you can navigate such an uncertain search landscape, the experts at Another Concept can help. Get in touch today.
