As you know, the December 2024 core update was announced on December 12, 2024 at around 10:46 am ET and Google said it would take about two weeks to complete. Well, this update seemed to have touched down, landed, over this weekend. There is a lot of volatility reported in the Google search results and with that, a lot of chatter within the SEO community.
As a reminder, this December 2024 core update, came a week after the November 2024 core update completed. But Google did hint last week that we should be expecting more core updates, more often - so maybe it will be a wild 2025?
So what are we seeing with this December 2024 core update - the latest Google search ranking algorithm update. To me, this feels bigger than the November 2024 core update - based on the tools and the chatter I am seeing. Of course, it is super early on and for any site that was hit by any core update, including the November core update, that November core update was also big. But this one seems to be impacting more sites, based on my gut.
Google Tracking Tools On December 2024 Core Update
All of these tools are showing big movement, bigger than I think what we had with the November 2024 core update. I mean, I don't think I've seen these tools are show such big movement in a long time.
Here is what these tools are showing over the past days compared to the days prior:
SEO Chatter
I am also seeing a lot of chatter from within the SEO community over the weekend. Here is what I see on this site, WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World - and other places:
Complice catastrofic from my end... my Traffic has Gone down almost 75% in The last two days.. hopefully it's a Google issue that will be solved soon.
Massive drop today!
After the convincingly bad November Core, rankings stabilized (at lower level) and started to actually very slowly recover.But no - Google had to immediately release December Core and keywords are rapidly collapsing again.
huge drop today in eastern Europe...
In Germany too, and presumably in the rest of Western Europe as well. The update seems to be affecting a lot of shops at the moment, especially grocery stores. My news page remains stable (bad, but at least it's not getting any worse).
not defeating just saying, it sucks, it's like google punished you because you are "too good"
New site, no issues in pages, beautiful content, great CTR, yet it drop after success in 1 month, morons made sure you can't rank anymore even with the new site, so obvious.
exactly. This is worse than anything I have seen. Before, I used to have a few first page listings. A few but pretty much every site is being wiped out. It's like Google's policy to show one real site on the first page max. The rest are YouTube, social media, eBay. ...
I can tell you it is not a rollback at all. I didn't gain anything with Nov update. I have lost many first page terms with this update. My site is essentially being pushed to the 2nd page and replaced by YouTube and social media pages plus AI spam.
When I first created the site and started publishing news, it not only indexed fine and quickly, but also participated in search. News that was published before reputable sites did was at the top of the search. Then one day the site disappeared from search and stopped being well indexed. I understand that this happened after the update, where only authoritative sites remained in the search. What to do now? - via here
A few weeks ago, my website had lost all its ranks. At first we thought its due to Google's algorithms, keep in mind, we didn't receive any manual penalty or anything like that. Nevertheless, we started working on off-page and cleansed it. Right after core update had finished my website was back to its former glory with all the ranks returning. Just today, something happened, lost all my ranks. - via here
Heads-up. Like I thought would be the case, I am now seeing the December core update landing. I'm seeing surges and drops across a number of sites (across verticals). And like with any core update, there are some big surges and drops... So check your stats, and stay tuned. I'll… pic.twitter.com/nFwcYcLjs6
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 15, 2024
Same for us 🥲
— Stefano (@Stefano_24_) December 15, 2024
Massive drop
— Marc Valls Pallejà (@MarcValls4) December 15, 2024
There is a lot more that I did not post.
What are you all seeing - this December core update seems big.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
