The Updates of August Edition

To say Google core updates can be pretty big things will seem like an understatement for listeners who got hammered by the Helpful Content Updates that ran in the two previous core updates of September 2023 and March 2024. The much anticipated August 2024 Core Update, the one that hold promise of fixing the mistakes of the past, started to roll out a few hours before this episode was recorded. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about what Google's goals with this update and what website owners can do in the early to mid days as the full rollout is expected to take about four weeks. It was a busy week beyond the core update. Kristine and Jim also discuss Google's two antitrust cases, updates to ChatGPT, a myriad of difficulties presented by Elon Musk, data delivery issues from Google Search Console, a creepy new feature found in knowledge panels, GSC Recommendations, the expansion of Google AI Overviews, how Google tracks crawl budgets, the absurd speed of Effingo, and a whole lot more. Stick around to the very end to hear Google's John Mueller read his latest robots.txt file.