Google started the November 2024 core update on Monday, which is expected to take two weeks to complete. As ever, be prepared to see fluctuations in your search appearance during the rollout. If you’re lucky enough to have a Yello website you can expect to come out the other side with no detrimental effects to your position in the search results (and maybe a slight boost). If, on the other hand, your website is prone to being hit by search updates, expect to be busy before Christmas trying to recover your lost positioning.
HCU Fix?
But what about if your website was penalised by the Helpful Content Update? We talked about this back in August when the last core update came out and like then, the official answer is, “Don’t hold your breath.” The Googleplex was host to a summit with creators whose sites disappeared from the search results in the September 2023 HCU. That’s when Google teased the release of the November core update but warned that it wouldn’t include a remedy for the HCU problems people are seeing. Nor would the next core update. Maybe, maybe, the core update after that would fix the problem.
Google’s engineers did take some time to listen to the attendees, all of whom have had their main search presence literally wiped out by Google and did have the good grace to at least admit that the problem is Google’s fault. It comes to something when a company with $300 billion turnover last year says, “It's not you, it’s me.”
So what is it going to do?
“Same old, same old,” is the answer.
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.
Google Search Central on LinkedIn
What we know is that Google has said that content on a website which is starkly different to the rest of the content will be considered as manipulative. Google doesn't want manipulative content in the search results, they want “good” content that is helpful to human beings appearing in the search results.
However, the issue will continue to be that Google’s algorithm, while it is getting better, simply isn’t as intelligent as Google thinks it is. Edge cases will always be a problem and this means we’re going to see unhelpful junk slip through into the search results and genuinely helpful content lost as it triggers a false positive.
A couple of things to bear in mind are:
Google swear blind that they don’t algorithmically penalise an entire website, each page is evaluated on its own merits.
Content should be created for human consumption, not search engines. Of course, it should be created in a way that search engines can understand it.
