What does the latest Google update want?

Google released their latest core update on Thursday 15th August 2024, and I’ve been looking at their comment. The question is relatively simple – what does the latest Google update want?

However, before we get into that, the core update hasn’t gone without problems. Google have confirmed a ranking bug is affecting search results. The full extent of the bug and implications aren’t known yet, so I’ll keep an eye out for further news.

You need to consider that the update only began rolling out on the 15th and Google say it could take a full month to complete. If you’re sat looking smugly at your screen and thinking that your SERPS look great, or haven’t been hit hard, you might want to hold that thought for a while.

That said, if you’re a small website owner, that publishes content with genuine intent and doesn’t sit trying to write for the sole purpose of SEO, you could be in for a pleasant surprise.

This is because of something Google said about the update and how you should almost certainly interpret it.

If you’ve only just latched on to the fact that Google likes good quality content, welcome to the party. I recently read a post on Facebook in which a supposed SEO expert was minimising the value of content, particularly frequently published content. He made the point that the right and technically sound foundation of your website is far more critical, which is of course correct. But, he made the mistake of not considering the bigger picture. What he should have been saying is that you need both. Instead, he almost completely dismissed the value of good content, rambling on about how pages from 4, 5 or 6 years ago can still achieve good ranking results. I don’t disagree with him about that, but you can be sure that the website hadn’t sat stagnant for that length of time unless it was for some obscure and bizarre long-tail phrase.

Let’s presume that your website foundations are what they should be, then look at what Google said in the first paragraph of their release statement:

This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

As an independent SEO consultant, and if you’re a digital agency reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking that Google are going to make our work harder. You’d be wrong. We all know if there is content that has been over-worked and stuffed. They’re simply telling you not to keep doing it. Are they going to penalise it more? Probably. Have they warned you time and time again? Definitely. If you do things properly, you’re very unlikely to encounter any issues with this side of the update.

That brings us to what Google considers to be good quality content and another part of their statement:

As always, we aim to connect people with a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches

“Useful, original content” – they’re ultimately telling people to write from the head and not from the screen. Far too many content writers still use other websites and plagiarise the content in a way they think won’t be noticed. Well, Google isn’t stupid.

Don’t just regurgitate existing content

They want content that you’ve actually curated in a way nobody else has. I’m writing this blog from scratch. I don’t have a reference site open (other than to get the quoted snippets from the Google statement) and I’m not copying and pasting sections and using ChatGPT to regurgitate them. Write it as it comes to mind.

Google also want it to help users. It needs to give an answer to a question, or spur a thought, or in some way assist the user so that they leave your website thinking they got something useful from it.

Interestingly, they do hint at the aforementioned foundations of a website being important with the “Range of high quality sites” being an important part of the statement. You can write amazing content, but if it isn’t published on a well structured site you’ve probably wasted your time (in fact you almost certainly have).

I don’t find the statement particularly interesting to that point. It is what comes after it that I’m intrigued by.

Their mention of “small or independent sites” could be something for larger websites to be very aware of. Quite how Google are going to set the parameters for the smaller and independent sites, I don’t know, but there could well be an opportunity for small and medium sized businesses to get above those incredibly irritating mega-companies that always dominate SERPS in your target sectors.

I find the last part of their statement equally interesting:

This update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web.

I’m reasonably sure that this is telling the world to set about fixing parts of their site, those niggly little errors and warnings behind the scenes that SEO-people are well aware of, and that you might be rewarded for it.

If you use any mainstream SEO tools that give you frequent crawl updates and highlight the issues you should be looking at, now is the time to get around to fixing them. In my opinion, Google are telling you they’re going to be watching for sites that make an effort to rectify known issues – and you could benefit from it.

In summary:

• Fix any known website issues that you’ve avoided making the effort on.
• If you use any black hat SEO techniques, even vaguely, stop them.
• Generate content that thinks only of the search visitor, not your aims.
• Stop over screen referencing, if you’re regurgitating content, it isn’t original.

Finally, the only term I’ve targeted with this blog was “What does the latest Google update once“, referencing it in the H1 and twice (bolded) in the body text. The featured image (and there is only one image) uses the same target words as part (but not all) of its ALT tag. The subtitle of the blog is a H2. The blog contains opinion in addition to information, in the form of recommendations that could be viewed as answers to a question.

There is one internal link (to my homepage) and one external link (to the Google statement). I haven’t paid any attention to passive voice or length of sentences. If you work in this sector, you’ll know there is only so much you can do on that score before ruining your content. There is no rocket science to it and it took approximately 20 minutes to write.