Although the August core update was accompanied by a ranking bug that hurt many websites’ search results, some sites affected by the unhelpful September 2023 helpful content update are reporting signs of life.
Thumbnails are back, too!
Early signs of recovery!
Google said its August core update would help sites affected by the September 2023 helpful content update recover their lost rankings.
Google also said the August update would reward small independent website owners who made positive site changes by creating high-quality, helpful content relative to the searcher’s intent.
It may be early days, and while the word recovery is a little strong, some sites affected by the helpful content update are seeing positive ranking movements.
Also, sites that were not affected by past updates saw some positive and negative changes.
And others are seeing nothing at all.
Positive update statistics
SEO professional Glenn Gabe has been following hundreds of sites affected by recent Google updates and has posted some positive ranking movements.
Gabe reported his findings on X:
- “I’m now seeing more HCU(X) sites surge. Out of the 380+ sites I’m tracking, 47 have surged since the August core update began rolling out. Note some have low visibility, but they have spiked with the update. Others have greater visibility and are surging back nicely.”
Glenn also posted some graph statistics showing movement in sites heavily affected by the helpful content update:
The early signs show that the August core update is beginning to revive suffering sites.
A bug in the system
With the August core update came a Search ranking bug that affected numerous search results.
Google has said the two aren’t connected and identified the cause.
- “There’s an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that’s affecting a large number of search results. We’ve identified the root cause, and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout. The next update will be within 12 hours.”
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller spoke of the bug on LinkedIn, saying Google sometimes has issues and it was just lousy timing:
- “Sometimes we have issues in our systems (like everyone), and we want to be transparent about them for users & site owners. This issue is unrelated to the core update that’s currently rolling out. Unfortunately, you can’t pick the timing of issues, sorry. We’ll update on the search status dashboard as things evolve—both for this issue, as well as for the roll-out of the core update.”
Gabe and Mueller discussed the bug on X:
Google confirmed it has yet to fix the ranking bug.
Thumbnails return for some
Another movement since the August 2024 core update is the return (for some) of missing thumbnails.
Since the September 2023 helpful content update, many sites have reported that their rich result image thumbnails were not showing in Search result snippets.
A quality issue:
Many publishers believe the missing thumbnails were caused by Google’s updates and how it calculated a site’s quality.
Sites that fell short of Google’s mercurial quality thresholds lost the ability to display their images in the search results.
Since the August update, some publishers have reported their image thumbnails returning, a positive sign that the latest update is doing what Google said it would.
Google`s John Mueller mentioned the return of thumbnails on LinkedIn:
- “Whew. It’s not completely rolled out yet, but I’m really happy to hear from you that it’s looking positive so far.”
When he is not writing content, Terry can be found on his boat in Italy or chilling in his villa in Spain.
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