The Google December 2024 spam update seems to have burned through the Christmas holiday, with high volatility on Christmas eve and day. I saw comments from site owners and creators about how devastated they were through the holidays and it was gut-wrenching to read those comments.
I do expect the update to be completed today, at least, when Google announced it on December 19th, Google said it may take up to one week to complete. Today is that day. (If it completes today, I’ll have another story on it tomorrow and I’ll add a comment below to this story so you know).
On Thursday, December 19th at 12 pm ET, Google began its release of the Google December 2024 spam update. As I covered already, this seems like one of the bigger spam updates from Google. It caused a lot of volatility pretty quickly and hit tons of sites, both large and small.
Plus, this came the day after the December 2024 core update, which was incredibly big as well, was completed. I suspect we will get more core updates, more often and probably more spam updates, more often, in 2025.
As I said above, this spam update burned through Christmas. Let me share that data.
Tracking Tools On December 2024 Spam Update
We are now a week into the spam update and look how much more heated these tools are compared to the December core update. It is wild.
SEO Chatter Over Christmas
Here is some of the chatter specifically over Christmas on this spam update from here, X, LinkedIn, Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld. There are also numerous threads in the Google Webmaster Help Forums quoted below:
December updates should be banned – Stop ruining our Christmas Google !
Bro I lost all my traffic in a day
I got hit and lost around 80% of my traffic in 2 days, many keywords just disappearing.
Same I have a drop between 50% to 30% everywhere in the globe, My biggest KW pool dropped by 80% all across the board. For now, it’s hard to conclude, because since the last March core updates my traffic sent remained the same but the quality has dropped a lot.
I would rather have a few users that engage and order than zombies. Will need a few weeks to have a first idea of what it is really.
Lost 0% because there was nothing to lose after the Nov update, can’t go into negative impressions.
My website traffic also dropped a lot after this update. I have purchased some backlinks, and some of them may be low-quality.
Is there any way to recover from the last update, I lost 90% of the traffic from Google but I didn’t receive any notification from Google.
I went from like 4k hits a day from Google to like 70 hits a day on one of my sites. No idea how to fix it.
So on the exact day when the spam update dropped, I had a surge in conversions. It has been such a long time that I ever had such a boost in 1 day. Despite knowing Google’s shenanigans, I have to admit I smiled a little and was in a good mood that day. But immediately right after that, spam sites flooded to the top and I was pushed down, .etc. In fact, this happened the night after the spam update was announced/dropped. Many have reported the same that they’re seeing massive spam sites moving to the top.
Guess what? Since that day until now (4 days counting) I have zero sales/conversions.
Maybe the holidays (Xmas, Hanuka, Kwanza, winter season, school holidays, .etc) are to blame, but you’re telling me everyone around the world – of different religion/race – have stopped shopping/subscribing/visiting? Come on.
Traffic has been low but I did have a good few days. I suppose its last minute shopping. I expect Jan to be BRUTAL, especially with returns and all of that.
We survived all updates, but this Spam update hit our 2 sites. Now, we are seeing mostly spam sites in SERPs. Google is destroying their reputation once again.
80% traffic lost after Google’s Spam update.
Not sure why but my site was getting a few thousand impressions daily and then just went to ziltch. Now I get almost zero per day and despite having over 200 unique pages with content that is interactive and not just text content, it appears a lot of them have been deindexed. The funny thing is my GSC says that they are still indexed but when I view all my indexed pages it is easy to tell a lot got removed from search.
Did anyone else get affected? Was there some sort of update? As far as I can tell there was a spam update on the 19th I think but my site is about 90% fresh made content made by myself. I have very little AI generated blurps to round out some of my pages.
Kinda crazy that it just tanked like this for no reason, I have been adding content and buffing it up easily over the last month.
I dont have so much technical experience and I am doing everything on my site from editing a website, posting articles and doing SEO, and for past few months my page wasnt looking so bad, we would get few thousand impressions and some clicks, but from last update that was on 19th of December called Spam update, our results dropped almost to zero impressions with few clicks, im just lost and I dont know what to do because basically what ever we did in past 10 months now it doesnt make sense…
Normally I have a minimum of 100 clicks and 1500 views each day. But 20 December its 15 clicks and 200 views and recent report from 21 December gives same low numbers. Could it be something to do with the core update / spam update around this period?
We were ranking on 1st position in SERP on different location like India, USA, UK, Australia etc. But after core and spam update, we are not ranking for any queries excluding India.
Some of our pages are still ranking on the samp position. What could be the reason to lose the ranking for given pages.Previously we were ranking on 1st for the given keywords but now anywhere.
Latest Google spam updates dropped traffic from 3k to 400-500 daily. Search console still shows good positions in Google Search, but there are no impressions and pages in search, but they are all indexed (they are in search if write with domain name).
Forum discussion at X, LinkedIn, Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld.