What do the latest Google guidelines mean for your website?

Staying on the good side of Google’s updates can feel like a never-ending task. Just when you think you’ve nailed your SEO strategy, along comes a new core update, changing the landscape again.

Read on to find out:

• What a “core update” is and what the most recent one aimed to do
• Google’s stance on AI-generated content
• The latest guidance on investigating and mitigating ranking and traffic drops
• Steps you can take to try and stay on the good side of Google’s algorithm and updates

A recap on Search Essentials

A little while ago now, we posted an article about Google’s Search Essentials and what they mean for your website. Search Essentials still apply as a fundamental framework for understanding how Google views and ranks websites – but as we’ll explore in this article, they are subtly changing their approach all the time.

Let’s just have a quick recap of what Google’s Search Essentials are to frame our understanding of what Google deems “good” when it comes to websites and content.

Search Essentials covers three key themes:

• Technical: you need to get a number of basic technical things right in order to ensure that Google can crawl and index your website. You can further optimise your technical setup to improve how Google understands your site.
• Spam policy: avoid techniques that Google views as “spammy” – i.e. solely and specifically to try and manipulate ranking.
• Key best practice: prioritise producing helpful content, make your content easy to find by using words people might use to search for it in prominent places, etc.

You can read Google’s Search Essentials in full here.

Google’s Core Updates

Google is constantly updating its algorithm to better understand and rank websites. They often tweak specific parts of their system, but around once or twice a year, they do a core algorithm update which brings about widespread changes and can have a significant impact on sites that fall foul of it (or the opposite).

Google’s commentary and guidance on each core update is usually pretty vague – but the SEO community at large is usually on hand to unpick what the update focuses on and track how it impacts or doesn’t impact websites.

The latest Core Update

At the time of writing, the latest Google core update was in August 2024.

According to industry experts and gleaning what we can from their official communications about the update, the focus was the following:

• Targeting content that is “specifically designed to rank” rather than provide actual value to users
• Show more content that people find genuinely useful
• Better reflect “positive” changes made by websites

As part of the update, Google also cautioned against trying to further improve first page rankings by making changes – instead wait for the algorithm to work through results to settle over weeks or months and review again. They also published more guidance on monitoring the effects of a core algorithm update on your website and how to recover should you get hit – which we’ll get to in more detail shortly.

What do Google guidelines say about AI?

More and more marketers are utilising AI to streamline process and content production. But what is Google’s stance on AI-generated content?

Google itself has begun integrating AI into search – you’ve probably noticed during a Google search recently you quite often get an AI generated overview at the top of the page. This SERP features pulls in information from different sites and content to present a short and easy-to-read overview

In terms of how they view website owners and content creators using AI – they haven’t updated their “official” guidance around AI-generated content since February 2023. Given they’ve released several core updates since then and released a whole host of guidance on other topics, we can assume their stance remains the same.

Google advises that they are about “rewarding high quality content, however it’s produced”. They refer to the E-E-A-T acronym they use to determine content quality – Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. As several thought leaders in the SEO industry have subsequently pointed out, when it comes to AI-generated content there’s a thin line to tread here for the second E – “experience”. How can AI demonstrate experience of a subject matter?

It’s all a bit murky – but the bottom line is Google explicitly says that “appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines”. That being said, there a few best practices you should follow if you’re going to use AI-generated content and not fall foul of one of Google’s updates:

• Treat AI like a “ghostwriter” – review, proofread and edit the copy just as you would with any other copywriter
• Consider adding “created by AI” to inform the user of how the content was produced
• Carefully monitor the impact of rolling out AI-generated content on your site by tracking traffic and rankings

Troubleshooting drops in traffic

Staying up to date and ahead of updates to Google’s algorithm can be tricky – after all no one really has any control over how these updates are going to impact your website – you only focus on what you can control and follow their guidance as best you can.

That being said, algorithm updates can cause fluctuations in rankings and traffic, but Google’s guidance around that largely advises a “wait and see” approach. It can take weeks or months for an update to rollout and for results to settle. It’s also important to remember that even small drops in position on page 1 (i.e. from 2 to 4) could have a big impact on traffic, as the top results on a SERP get the largest share of traffic. Position 1 is estimated to get around 40% of clicks, whereas this drops to 7.4% by position 4.

Traffic and ranking fluctuations happen regardless of core algorithm updates. If you’ve noticed a drop-off in traffic it’s probably a good time to review your SEO as a whole and look at the bigger picture.

Here are just some of the factors that can cause traffic and ranking drops:

• Technical issues – errors that crop up and prevent Google from crawling your website properly
• Security issues – if your website or part of your website has been compromised, Google is likely to penalise it (drop it down in the rankings) or stop showing it completely to protect the user
• Site moves and migrations – moving to a new site if not executed correctly can cause a big drop in rankings and traffic. We’ve put together a checklist for migration to ensure you do all the right things to try and mitigate big fluctuations*
• Seasonal interest – depending on your market, interest in your product/service may change throughout the year. It’s worth checking your traffic from previous years to see if there’s a trend.

*note that even if you execute a migration well and follow best practice, it’s still possible you’ll see some fluctuations as Google recrawls your site and indexes your new pages and content.

Keeping up with Google – what can you do?

• Keep an eye on publications like Search Engine Journal for upcoming or recent updates
• Follow @searchliaison (also on LinkedIn)
• Follow industry experts like Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick)
• Do regular SEO audits and stay on top of the technical health of your website – a partner like Adaptable can support you with this

Need more guidance on your website and SEO? Get in touch to find out how we could help.