On Thursday, December 19th at 12 pm ET, Google began its release of the Google December 2024 spam update. It seems like that update kicked into gear the day or so after it was released, but honestly, it is hard to tell if the damage is from the spam update or the tail end of the completed Google December 2024 core update (which completed the day before).
Google would say, if you are spamming, assume it is the spam update. Otherwise, it is not the spam update. Most people don't think they are spamming, although, some might.
That being said, I have been watching the SEO communities and threads and there is a lot of chatter around sites being deindexed and deranked, where sites are losing tons of traffic after his spam update was unleashed. Also, some are saying this is now promoting spam, not demoting it.
This is all while, Google continues to send out manual actions (or remove manual actions) over the site reputation abuse penalty - which is not algorithmic yet and thus would not be part of this spam update (I asked Google again to confirm this (waiting to hear back), if something changed, I'll post about it).
This chatter is coming from Black Hat World, WebmasterWorld, LinkedIn, comments here and other places. Here are some select quotes:
Hey everyone, I was doing just fine with every update till December spam update, today I woke up to -50%. Seems like all my inner pages have lost rankings. Anybody experience the same thing?IDK what they want, never purchased backlink, all content is high quality, no AI, visitors love it, not posting more than 10-15 daily. Really weird.
Got 40% traffic increase after Core Update, and immediately lost 50% traffic right after Spam Update was announced :)
My # of indexed pages is the same, but some of them disappeared from the rankings. Others kept their positions or went up.But overall the traffic looks roughly 50% down...
Me too, all my inner pages have lost rankings, Replaced by Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Reddit
This website got wrecked in March. From 1500 clicks per day to 150 clicks per day. Overnight.Now the sats for last 3 months + yesterday. Also, check Discover. is it back? If yes, there might be sings of recovery.
I was doing better with every update in the past 1 year, this December spam got me bad.
I lost 4k pages, they are all crawled but not indexed
A lot of my rankings cames back except for the primary city which is against a pbn army of sites with high authority. It seems like a penalty was removed while high authority domains still dominate per googles metrics
Spam update is doing exactly what is supposed to do , rank the spam higher.
The traffic was a bit higher again yesterday and today. However, the ranking of my news page is going crazy. And if I'm seeing it right, the update is going as usual: big brands win, spam increases and small publishers get even more problems.About the shop: it remains dead. Although the number of visitors (and the ranking) is okay, there are still no sales.
Has anyone lost 90% or more of their traffic and ranking pages in the last 3 days?
LOL is this why I lost traffic, I mean from over 10k in impressions to 0 😅. Not fair.
Does anyone of guys experiencing this? Site, no AI, all original content. Google started deindexing some pages in March 2024. Now, it continues deindexing.
Google gave me 5% traffic boost and now took it back haha, such loosers, they didn't even intend to give me a boost, it was by accident.
So two of my HCU hit sites and one E-Com site seemingly got hit yesterday and plummeted-60% nice…merry Christmas I guess
One of my HCU hit websites has fully recovered, from 20 traffic a day back to 3k. Never had any movement since march, hope it sticks!
I have several websites that were affected during the March update. Currently, there are positive signs, as many keywords have started to reappear in google. There's an improvement in impressions and clicks in GSC, but I think it's still too early to celebrate and say that my websites are back to life.
Heads-up about the Dec Spam Update: I'm seeing some huge drops on sites with the December Spam Update, and several were negatively impacted by the December Broad Core Update too (but not as badly as the spam update). Wow, and some big sites... Very interesting. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/PONs0pip2a
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 23, 2024
I am not going to post all the tool screenshots today but most were pretty heated over the weekend and have now begun to start to cool down.
I suspect this update will be completed soon, I suspect Google will announce it is done sometime today or tomorrow (but I am wrong a lot).
Forum discussion at Black Hat World, WebmasterWorld, and LinkedIn.
