Google’s December 2024 core update started December 12, 2024 and completed about 6 days later on December 18, 2024. As a reminder, every core update that Google confirms means that the ranking changes from the core update should be visible enough for Google to announce it. That being said, the December 2024 core update was more volatile and more widespread than the November 2024 core update, but less so than the August and March 2024 core updates, according to data providers.
One thing to note, the December core update rollout was packed within a short 6-day period, whereas the November core update was over a 24-day period.
Do understand that if a core update impacts a site, it can result in a huge change for that site’s search visibility. So, I do not want to diminish the November or December core updates; those could have been really big for you or the sites you manage.
Spam update and manual actions during/after. Also, to keep things interesting. Google released the December 2024 spam update the day after the December 2024 core update finished, that spam updater is still currently rolling out. So that may make looking at the data a bit complex. Plus, Google expanded its site reputation abuse policy during the time Google was rolling out this November 2024 core update. That led to a nice number of large and small websites being hit by a manual action (Google search penalty), resulting in some cases, a lot of visibility losses for those sites in Google Search.
Data providers on the Google December 2024 core update
Similarweb. SimilarWeb’s SERP Seismometer showed large spikes in volatility with the December update. It took a couple of days after the December core update was announced but the volatility did kick in. “Although the December update was announced on December 12th, significant fluctuations were first observed starting on December 14th,” Shay Harel from Similarweb told us.
When you compare the previous core updates to this December 2024 core update, you can see it was more volatile than the November 2024 core update but less volatile than the August and March core updates. Here is that chart:
The relative position change was also higher with this December core update compared to the November core update:
When comparing the top 3, top 5 and top 10 positions, you see the same trend where the December core update was larger than the November core update.
When it came to specific industries, Shay Harel told us, “When analyzing the health, finance, retail, and travel niches, the finance niche experienced low levels of fluctuations in the top 3 results. In contrast, the health niche displayed similar levels of SERP fluctuations in both the top 3 and top 5 results.”
Semrush. Semrush (our parent company) also sent us data that seemed to show that the December core update was more volatile than the November 2024 core update. But as Mordy Obserstein, a company spokesperson, told us, “Between the number of updates and the level of volatility seen before updates they are really making decoupling the volatility and creating accurate comparisons between updates very difficult.”
That being said, here is the chart from Semrush’s sensor that tracks volatility over the past 30 days or so that shows much higher volatility with the December core update compared to the November core update:
This next chart shows the December 2024 Core Update hitting a higher peak levels of volatility than the November update:
They also broke down the volatility by industry in this next chart, comparing December to November. You can see how much more volatile the December update was compared to the November update, across all industries:
Also, the December 2024 Core Update saw an average position gain/loss of around 2.8 positions, which is a bit higher than the 2.4 we saw with the November update:
Other tools. There are a lot of Google search ranking volatility tools. Here is what they looked like after the core update finished rolling out and over the course of the update:
Industry. Based on what I track with the community, this update felt like it dropped fast and in a big way, and continued to be super volatile throughout the 6-day rollout. The data from the data providers listed above, match what the SEO industry was seeing.
And now with the December 2024 spam update rolling out, Google still seems volatile.
What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. Google has not really given much new advice here.
- There aren’t specific actions to take to recover. A negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages.
- Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update.
- Google said you can see a bit of a recovery between core updates but the biggest change would be after another core update.
In short, write helpful content for people and not to rank in search engines.
- “There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people. For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page,” Google said previously.
More on Google updates
You can read more of our coverage in Search Engine Land’s Google Algorithm Updates history.
Why we care. While the data above shows how sites in general are doing with the last core update, it does not represent how your individual site did with the update. If your site was hit by this past update, it can be devastating. If you were hit by previous updates and so no improvement with this update, then again, devastating once again. But some sites saw big improvements.
Feel free to compare this to our December core update report.
We hope you saw improvements.