On August 15, 2024, Google officially announced the release of a new update to its search engine (August 2024).
The duration for full implementation has not yet been confirmed, so for now, we must stay tuned for official announcements when this occurs.
What happened with the last update in March 2024?
This Google update comes with higher expectations following the complaints and controversies that arose in March.
Google began prioritizing more established sites, regardless of how much authority or expertise they had on the topic. As a result, many independent sites that were specialized in specific topics experienced significant and unfair decreases in traffic.
In the announcement of the update, Google stated: “This latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months. As always, we 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. This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates. This update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web.”
And what happened in tourism with that update?
In my opinion, it was one of the hardest-hit sectors; many well-established sites like Travel and Leisure experienced significant traffic declines.
There was also a noticeable improvement in tourism sites that genuinely demonstrated first-hand experiences, which is not a bad thing, but it could leave behind sites that can’t compete by being in the locations they are covering (although some sites were abusing this anyway).
We’ll have to see how Google treats new tourism sites in this update.
