Google launched two updates in December that rolled out in succession like waves carrying happy surfers to the beach and a tsunami to the unlucky few. Many SEOs who braced for SERP drama were met with a surprising impact.
Google’s Previous Updates Were Big
I have been doing SEO for 25 years and have been through many updates. Some were big, others were incremental changes. The 2003 Google Florida Update was the first of the major updates. Others were the Penguin algorithm update, Medic Update and the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. There were also system updates in 2023 that were devastating and largescale.
What Are The Hallmarks Of A Big Update?
The updates from late 2023 through the Spring of 2024 were huge and destroyed the livelihoods of many websites. How do we know the updates were big? We know because the comments online indicate that the effects are widespread and consistently experienced.
If Google doesn’t tell what changed you can still get an idea of what changed by the anecdotal evidence. For example, the Medic Update is called Medic because the people most affected were publishing websites related to medical topics. The kinds of sites that lost rankings were the non-scientific alternative medicine websites. That didn’t mean that Google was targeting health websites. What it meant was that Google changed how it was interpreting the meaning of search queries. It was most visible in medical topics but it was not limited to medical topics.
Circling back, you can get an idea of the impact of an update and maybe get an idea of what kind of change was made, by seeing how people in social media and how other SEOs are experiencing the update.
TL/DR About The December Core Update
The TL/DR is that:
1. It feels like Google dialed something back which allowed sites that were previously hit by algorithm updates to begin receiving some traffic. This was one thing that stood out.
2. The other thing that stood out is that there wasn’t a large group of SEOs and publishers saying that they were negatively affected by this specific update. It’s been the case since 2023 that each successive update affected a great deal of sites that had never been negatively affected by Google’s updates and the outcry was unanimous and specific to the update. This wasn’t the case with this update.
3. Obviously this isn’t going to be everyone’s experience with this update. There is no doubt some who have a negative experience of this update. But the scale of that experience is not on the same level as some of the major updates like the March 2024, Penguin and other major updates.
Facebook Groups: General Consensus
A common theme in Facebook and forum posts is that the Google Update had a positive effect that resulted in many sites hit by previous sites were returning to life all by themselves. One person reported that a number of their dormant affiliate sites suddenly awakened and were attracting traffic. Then there were some random SEOs taking credit for de-ranked client sites returning to the SERPs, leading me to wonder if they also take credit for their clients losing rankings in the first place…
Black Hat Response To Google’s Updates
Most of the time Google has an update the first ones to feel it are the people in black hat forums. Strangely, that was not the case with this specific update.
The forums on Black Hat World (BHW) generally provide an indicator of how much hurt Google’s updates are handing out. Some members of BHW forum were posting about how their sites were coming back.
One member posted:
“This new update is the first update in past years for my websites to grow 🙂 For now, traffic has increased 100%+ and keeps going up…”
Another one echoed that post:
“For me it is going good for 2 days. Hope not to be bad…”
A third member shared:
“My website ranking returned today after 9 months from March update. So seams the keywords and links showing again for first time since. I was affected by the march and thought it wouldn’t recover ever again hopefully this December update once finished rolling out my site won’t be removed again”
And yet another one shared a similar experience:
“My dead website is starting to pick up keywords on ahrefs, increasing impressions on search console, but still no major change regarding traffic.”
There was one outlier who shared that their financial site lost rankings likely due to having been built on expired domains (though it’s easy to imagine other reasons).
Among the celebratory sharing was this outlier post from someone whose glass is half empty:
“Lots of sites got tanked including 3 of mine.”
Overall there was a positive tone to the black hat forum members sharing their actual experiences with Google’s December updates. That fits the pattern of what was being shared in Facebook groups, that the December updates were bringing some sites back from whatever algorithm hits they suffered in previous updates.
Then There Is The X Response.
On X, every Google update announcement is met by many comments about how big brands are the winners, spam sites are dominating the SERPs (which contradicts the first complaint), and that Google is destroying small businesses. These kinds of comments have been around for decades, from before X/Twitter. The defining characteristic of such remarks is that they are general in nature and don’t reflect anything specific about the update; they’re just venting about Google.
The response to Google’s update announcement on X was predictably negative. I’m not being snarky when I say the responses were predictably negative, that’s the consistent tone for virtually every update announcement that Google makes on X.
Most of the tweets in response to Google’s core algorithm and the spam updates were general in nature and not specific to either of these updates.
The responses on X to Google’s update announcement can be characterized as:
- General reactions
- Comments that Reddit benefits from Google updates
- Tweets by people who are suffering from past updates
- Commentary that Google is broken and can’t be trusted
Tweets That Are General Reactions
An example of a general reaction tweet:
“The more you roll out these updates, the closer you move to oblivion. Your search engine is already unusable, drowning in ads, AI Overviews, and your many properties and panels, with rankings that consistently favor reputation-abusing big publishers. Sometimes, returning to basics is the best innovation—Google could learn a thing or two about this right now.”
Another general reaction tweet:
“Nothing more to take away from us. So, not going to worry about this…”
Tweets That Say Reddit Benefits From Google Updates
Another kind of non-specific tweets are the ones that opine that Google updates mainly benefit Reddit.
An example of a Reddit Wins Again tweet:
“You can also roll out them on a weekly basis , it doesn’t matter to the small publishers!
It will be always a win for Reddit!”
Another Reddit Wins reaction:
“Oh, you meant to say that you are always looking for ways to boost Reddit, Forbes, and Quora more. There, I fixed it.”
Tweets From People Suffering From Past Updates
This tweet is a reaction from someone who has suffered from previous updates and is representative of other similar tweets:
“My site went from 4k views per day, to 10 views per day yesterday in a year.
December 2024 might be the final nail in the coffin.
I really hope I can turn it around somehow.”
Google Is Broken And Can’t Be Trusted Tweets
Another kind of response is that Google Search is broken and can’t be trusted.
Like this one that says Google can’t be trusted:
“We don’t trust Google anymore. It’s time to move on to Microsoft.”
And this one about increasing traffic from other search engines:
“It’s becoming obvious more and more people are moving to Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex and Yahoo.
Seeing a huge influx of traffic from all those sites, plus others, on all five websites we own.”
And this one:
“Always ruining not improving..”
Good!”
The reaction to Google’s Spam Update announcement was similarly general in nature.
Again, I am not minimizing the experiences of the people making those posts. I am just pointing out that none of those posts reflect experiences specific to the December Google updates. They are general statements about Google’s algorithms. Those kinds of general responses that are not specific to the December updates define the responses to Google’s December updates.
Outlier Opinions
Same as with everything else, there are also some opinions that are outliers, outside of the norms of what many people are experiencing. For example, there are some outliers who were posting that the update was big. But the reaction on X, Facebook and elsewhere doesn’t match that opinion.
2024 was a year of massive change. But the responses to the December 2024 don’t add up to a consensus that the December Google Core algorithm update affected a large amount of people.
Google’s Core Algorithm Update: What Happened?
It feels clear that Google dialed back something in the algorithm that was suppressing the rankings of many websites. It’s been my opinion that Google’s algorithms that determine if a site is “made for search engines” has been overly hard on expert sites by people whose poor understanding of SEO resulted in otherwise high quality sites laden with high traffic keywords, sometimes showing exact matches to keywords shown in People Also Asked. That, in my opinion, results in a “made for search engines” kind of look. Could it be that Google tweaked that algorithm to be a little more forgiving of “content spam” so that it ignores it and let’s the content speak for itself just as Google does for link spam?
Something to consider is that this update was followed by an anti-spam update, which could be an improved classifier to catch the spam sites that may have been set loose by the core algorithm update, while leaving the expert sites in the search results.
What About 2025?
Google’s CEO recently stated that 2025 would be a year of major changes. If the two December updates are representative of what’s coming in the future it could be that the heralded changes may not be as harsh as the series of updates in 2024. We can hope, right?
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