On December 19th, 2024, at 12 PM ET, Google started to roll out its December 2024 spam update. After the completion of a seven-day rollout cycle, the update finally finished on December 26th.
This was the third spam update for this year and it was launched just a day after the December 2024 core update finished rolling out.
It was not a link spam update but more of a general and broad spam update. However, it did not automate the site reputation abuse policy which is still only done by manual actions.
The Effect of the December 2024 Spam Update
As the December 2024 spam update was released just after the 2024 core update, it hit hard and fast after its launch. A lot of website owners experienced de-ranking and deindexing issues early on. The effect of the update stayed quite prominent through and after Christmas.
This was considerably a big and widespread update, seen in quite a long time, that affected the rankings of a lot of websites. Website owners must look for changes in ranking on Search Console rather than looking for traffic drops as the holiday season traffic is very volatile and it remains low for most websites.
More About the Update
According to Google, the December 2024 spam update is made at a global level and will apply to all languages. Google also linked the update to its “spam updates page” which was shared on October 31, 2024. It is yet not clear which spam policies this update exactly targets but there are a lot of speculations around it.
Here are some key aspects of the Google December 2024 spam update that you must know:
- Targets- Websites that violate Google’s search spam policies.
- Does Not Target- Websites that do link spam, violate the site reputation abuse policy, and some other policies.
- Penalty- The update sends penalties to websites using specific spam techniques that are against Google’s spam policies.
- Impact- Google has not issued any clarification on what percentage of searches or queries were impacted by this update.
- Recovery- According to Google, if you are hit by this update, you should review its spam policies and make sure that your website complies with them accurately.
- Refreshes- Google said that it will release periodic refreshes to the spam update. This might take several months to recover.
Why Should We Care?
To most businesses and website owners, this update came as a surprise as it was launched right after the last core update finished. It was quite unexpected that Google would release another major update during the holiday season, which does not usually happen.
This was the 7th and probably the last search algorithm update of 2024 released by Google, along with four core updates and two other spam updates.
It seems like Google is dedicatedly focusing more on making the search experience better for users by providing them with more helpful and genuine content than before.
On December 19th, 2024, at 12 PM ET, Google started to roll out its December 2024 spam update. After the completion of a seven-day rollout cycle, the update finally finished on December 26th.
This was the third spam update for this year and it was launched just a day after the December 2024 core update finished rolling out.
It was not a link spam update but more of a general and broad spam update. However, it did not automate the site reputation abuse policy which is still only done by manual actions.
The Effect of the December 2024 Spam Update
As the December 2024 spam update was released just after the 2024 core update, it hit hard and fast after its launch. A lot of website owners experienced de-ranking and deindexing issues early on. The effect of the update stayed quite prominent through and after Christmas.
This was considerably a big and widespread update, seen in quite a long time, that affected the rankings of a lot of websites. Website owners must look for changes in ranking on Search Console rather than looking for traffic drops as the holiday season traffic is very volatile and it remains low for most websites.
More About the Update
According to Google, the December 2024 spam update is made at a global level and will apply to all languages. Google also linked the update to its “spam updates page” which was shared on October 31, 2024. It is yet not clear which spam policies this update exactly targets but there are a lot of speculations around it.
Here are some key aspects of the Google December 2024 spam update that you must know:
- Targets- Websites that violate Google’s search spam policies.
- Does Not Target- Websites that do link spam, violate the site reputation abuse policy, and some other policies.
- Penalty- The update sends penalties to websites using specific spam techniques that are against Google’s spam policies.
- Impact- Google has not issued any clarification on what percentage of searches or queries were impacted by this update.
- Recovery- According to Google, if you are hit by this update, you should review its spam policies and make sure that your website complies with them accurately.
- Refreshes- Google said that it will release periodic refreshes to the spam update. This might take several months to recover.
Why Should We Care?
To most businesses and website owners, this update came as a surprise as it was launched right after the last core update finished. It was quite unexpected that Google would release another major update during the holiday season, which does not usually happen.
This was the 7th and probably the last search algorithm update of 2024 released by Google, along with four core updates and two other spam updates.
It seems like Google is dedicatedly focusing more on making the search experience better for users by providing them with more helpful and genuine content than before.