On Monday, November 11, 2024 - Google announced that they released their latest Core Algorithm Update, which will take up to two weeks to full complete the rollout - which takes us right up to Thanksgiving and Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which will kick off the 2024 Holiday Shopping Season. You can check the status of this update and when it completes on the Google Search Status Dashboard.
This is the latest confirmed Google Algorithm update since the August 2024 Core Update - which finished in early September 2024.
The official Quote from Google is:
"Today we released the November 2024 core update to Google Search.
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.
We'll update our ranking release history page in the near future, and update it when the rollout is complete. For more information about core updates, please see here.
The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete."
The SEO Content Goblins do find Google's language interesting. They continue to mention helpful content, and don't create content for ranking, but the part about "useful" content - not just helpful content - but Useful Content. To the SEO Content Goblins this seems to mean that they will reward existing and new content that users find helpful - think the content/page aligns with the Users Intent of the query, did they get the information, or complete the 'task' of what they needed to - is this hinting at AI Overviews?
This update doesn't really come as a surprise to the SEO Content Goblins.
We normally see Google tweaks the ranking systems pre-and up to and through the holiday shopping season.
Google hinted that something was coming at an event a couple weeks ago.
Additionally, Google has said in the past that the next update was not going to help websites that were impacted by the Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update.
The SERP Volatility indexes are showing some increase in volatility, but to be honest - the SERPs have been heated for months, like the SEMRush volatility index.
It's important for business, website owners, digital markets to pay attention, but not have a knee-jerk reaction - and let the full algorithm roll out.
Declines that you see this week might reverse, and any improvements in rankings that you see now - might change by the time this November 2024 Core Update from Google finishes.
Once the update finishing assess traffic changes - especially on important pages (home page, product pages, category pages, etc.))
Review keywords that changed, dropped out of page 1, or moved onto page 1.
As far as recovery and responses - Google's Guidance is:
Don't focus on quick fixes - improve content in a meaningful way.
Recovery might take time, weeks, if not months - or until the next Core Update is released - which Google releases every 3 to 6 months.
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