SEOIntel Weekly News Round-up (Last Week of September 2024)

Three weeks up after the core update and ranking volatility remains, with what initially was thought of as recovery being lost along the way, again. That and more in this week’s notable news in SEO. Read more below:

Search Ranking Volatility Continues, With Initial Recoveries Being Wiped Out

Search ranking volatility continues, three weeks after the completion of the August Core Update last September 3. We’ve wondered in the past week if this is now the new normal, now that a lot of the ranking systems are running real-time, and it seems to cement that week per week.

Search Engine Roundtable reports that some of those who have seen recovery from being hit in previous updates are now reporting reversals, with initial gains being lost post-core update.

Google has stated that the August Core Update considered the feedback they have heard from creators and others over the past few months. They aim to connect people with a range of high-quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches, and to better capture improvements that sites may have made.

Yet, it seems like no recovery is happening, and what was initially thought of as a recovery seems to be a carrot dangled, then taken away.

Google Updates Spam Policies Document

As part of their routine refresh of their documentation, Google updated its documentation on their spam policies, adding more details on their site reputation abuse policy and other areas of the guidelines.

On the documentation update details, Google noted that they clarified some wording in their spam policies for Google web search to focus more on what web spam is and the tactics involved. They also integrated an explanation of close involvement from their blog post for easier reference, and clarified that trying to circumvent their policies can also result in ranking lower or not at all. They state that they review and refresh their documentation periodically and that this update is part of that process.

The section added to the site reputation abuse policy states:

“Close oversight or involvement is when the first-party hosting site is directly producing or generating unique content (for example, via staff directly employed by the first-party, or freelancers working for staff of the first-party site). It is not working with third-party services (such as “white-label” or “turnkey”) that focus on redistributing content with the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings.”

Check out the documentation on Spam policies for Google web search for a refresher on what Google considers spam.

No More Cache Search Operator

Google has completely disabled the “cache:” search operator in Google Search and has removed it from the search operator documentation. This is after they have removed the cache link a couple of months ago and added links to the Wayback Machine a few weeks ago, for those who are looking to see how a site looked like previously.

The removal of the cache was reported earlier this year and Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, statement on the feature removal has been:

Hey, catching up. Yes, it’s been removed. I know, it’s sad. I’m sad too. It’s one of our oldest features. But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it. Personally, I hope that maybe we’ll add links to

@internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result. It’s such an amazing resource. For the information literacy goal of About The Result, I think it would also be a nice fit — allowing people to easily see how a page changed over time. No promises. We have to talk to them, see how it all might go — involves people well beyond me. But I think it would be nice all around. As a reminder, anyone with a Search Console account can use URL Inspector to see what our crawler saw looking at their own page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289… You’re going to see cache: go away in the near future, too. But wait, I hear you ask, what about noarchive? We’ll still respect that; no need to mess with it. Plus, others beyond us use it.