Happy New Year! 2024 was an eventful year for Google Search, wasn’t it? We have been kept very busy with our monthly updates this year. AI Overviews were released worldwide, Google lost an anti-trust trial in the US and algorithm updates trashed the ranking of many sites.
Despite once assuring us that it was careful not to release updates during holiday periods, December saw 2 new updates to the Google Search algorithm on the back of the November Core Update which rolled out during Thanksgiving and was active early December. No rest for us poor SEOs! Not even for Christmas.
And we also have a promise from Google CEO Sundar Pinchai that things are going to get really exciting in 2025!
December 5th – End of the November 2024 Core Update
Released on November 11th, the November 2024 Core Update rolled out through Thanksgiving and until December 5th. The consensus is that this was a relatively small update that did not impact a lot of sites. We are not told what specific changes were made to the core systems of Google when these updates are released. It is possible that this update was only meant to target specific types of sites.
Volatility in search results – an indicator used to measure the importance of updates – was not constant during the rollout. Volatility was notable on November 17th, November 26th and December 4th. Supposing that volatility recorded on Thanksgiving was not linked to the update but to the holiday weekend, we can imagine that, as we suspected last month, the update was mainly on pause from November 17th to December 4th.
Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Land that he had been told by a Google insider that the update had finished rolling out on December 5th and this was confirmed on the Google Search Status Dashboard.
December 12th – December 2024 Core Update
A week later, Google then surprisingly released a new Core Update. As ever, unimaginatively named “The December 2024 Core Update”. The low impact of the November 2024 update led many to speculate that the November update had somehow failed, and this was the correction.
Posting on LinkedIn, X and BlueSky, Google Search Liaison quashed this speculation saying : “If you’re wondering why there’s a core update this month after one last month, we have different core systems we’re always improving. This past blog post explains more: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/11/q-and-a-on-search-updates”.
Google Search Liaison commented that the rollout was completed as of December 18th on X and BlueSky with John Mueller giving the news on LinkedIn.
The blog post linked to from the various social media posts is a 2024 article written by Danny Sullivan (who is also the person behind the Google Search Liaison moniker). It contains a section Aren’t there supposed to be no updates during the holiday shopping season? that reads “We do try to avoid having updates during the late-November to mid-December period when possible. But it’s not always possible. If we have updates that can improve Search, that have been developed over the course of several months, we release them when they’re ready.”
Analyzing SERP volatility, Barry Schwartz said that this appeared to be a bigger update causing much more volatility than the November update.
December 19th – December 2024 Spam Update
The very next day a new update was released. This time a spam update.
The update was announced on LinkedIn and X by the Google Search Central account with little information. The posts read simply, “It may take up to 1 week to complete. This is a normal spam update, and it will roll out for all languages and locations”. Again, this debunked the idea that Google was careful not to release updates through the holiday period!
Following information on the Google Search Status Dashboard, the update officially ended on the evening of December 26th, but most changes to search results were felt during the first two days: December 19th and December 20th. Barry Schwartz reported on website owners experiencing deindexing (where pages disappear from search results) or deranking (where pages drop down in ranking – usually by multiples of 10 places).
Spam Updates could target one or many of the illicit practices detailed in Google’s spam policies. This update does not concern the Site Reputation Abuse policy, and it is thought that it does not concern link spam because these updates are typically named differently. We are guessing that this update targets Scaled Content Abuse which could include using AI to generate many pages without much added value.
New documentation on crawling
Over the month of December, Gary Illyes published a series of blog posts about “crawling”, ending with the Crawling out of December: the 2024 recap. Crawling is the name given to the action of Google visiting websites to index them.
These posts may be too technical for most readers, and they do not assume that websites are on WordPress so it may be difficult to apply some of the advice given. Developers or owners of large sites, however, may find them useful. There is a specific article on using CDNs like Cloudflare.
More information on handling crawling issues in WordPress can be found in our article Solving a Google Indexing Emergency
Also note for extra information on Robots.txt, the following video from Google and the SEOPress feature that allows you to edit your Robots.txt file in WordPress.
Search Off The Record looks back on 2024
Released on December 31st, the last episode of the Search Off the Record podcast for 2024 sees the Google Search Relations team Lizzi Sassman, John Mueller, Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes reminiscing about their experiences in 2024 including some criticism of Google Search results. The video concludes with the invitation to follow them in 2025 on LinkedIn (omitting X where they have also been very active in the past).
Google will change profoundly in 2025
Finally in our round up of Google news in December 2024, we go back to a December 4th talk with Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai at the New York Times DealBook Summit. During this talk he said that the search engine would change profoundly in 2025 saying “I think you will be surprised even in early 25 by the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today”.
He also talked about rivalry with Microsoft over the use of generative AI in search results and the upcoming ruling from the US federal courts that aims to break Google’s monopoly. These two subjects may also heavily influence how Google will change in 2025.
More interesting times are ahead, so make sure you subscribe to our newsletter in 2025 to keep abreast of Google news that impacts WordPress SEO.
