Google released the highly anticipated August 2024 core update on Thursday morning. Less than 24 hours later, Google Search confirmed a ranking error that is still ongoing.

This means that Google Search is currently volatile. And many SEOs and publishers have documented some of their observations since the core update rolled out in August.

reservations. Be sure to consider the following points as they can impact your organic search traffic on Google:

What we see. In short: Most people don’t see anything. That’s normal.

But for the first time, we’re seeing some signs of life on sites that were negatively impacted by the helpful September 2023 content update.

To be clear, these sites have not “recovered” and are nowhere near where they were before the helpful September 2023 content update. However, some are seeing an increase in rankings and visibility in Google Search.

• Some victims of helpful content updates notice an improvement in visibility in Google search
• Nobody would yet call these increases a “recovery”
• Even sites affected by previous core updates, such as the March 2024 core update, show changes, some positive, some negative
• Even on some websites that were never affected by a core update, there are changes, some of them positive, some negative

I have documented many of the more detailed conversations within the SEO industry on Search Engine Roundtable.

Glenn Gabe, an SEO consultant, has observed a few hundred sites that were negatively impacted by the helpful content update. Gabe wrote that 47 of these sites are showing some small signs of life – some increases in visibility:

• “I’m seeing more HCU(X) sites on the rise now. Of the 380+ sites I track, 47 have seen an uptick since the core update rolled out in August. Note that some sites have low visibility but have seen an uptick with the update. Others have better visibility and are bouncing back.”

House Fresh and Retro Dodo. These two sites have received a lot of media attention due to their Google ranking issues. Both reported fluctuations in recent days – but no full recovery. Here are the posts:

Why we care. We’re only a few days into the month-long rollout of the August Core Update, while a search ranking bug is still ongoing, so it’s hard to say if sites will continue to improve and what’s causing this movement. Your traffic could continue to improve – but it could also get worse over the next few days.

We don’t know what direction this update is going in. But we will continue to monitor it and report what we find. We hope you all have success and improvements with this Google algorithm update.