After just under 26 days, the Google November 2023 core update is finally done rolling out. It took almost two weeks longer to roll out than the average core update and rolled out during the huge shopping days on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also overlapping the November 2023 reviews update. So it was a big deal.
Google posted the update was done at 11:32 am ET on November 28, 2023, after it started rolling out on November 2, 2023 at 3:09 PM ET.
This is the longest documented core update rollout, the previous longest core update rollout went to the August 2023 core update took 16 days, this one was 10 days longer. It wasn't as long as most SEOs thought it would take, but it was the longest rollout of a core update. It was not the longest update in general, the December 2022 helpful content update took 38 days to roll out but it was the longest core update roll out in history.
As a reminder, the October 2023 core update started on October 5, 2023 and completed on October 19, 2023, completing two weeks prior to this November core update rolled out.
Here are the posts on the release times:
The roll-out of the November core update is now complete.https://t.co/geIJA2Bg8g
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 28, 2023
Documented Volatility For November 2023 Core Update
This update kicked off quickly and was super volatile early on. The chatter within the SEO community was pretty heated throughout - even during the Thanksgiving holiday break. The tools themselves seemed to calm down, even with the reviews update rolling out the following week.
There was some additional chatter in the past 24 hours about massive volatility but the tools are not picking that up and the chatter was not that insane.
The tools themselves shows volatility from November 2nd through November 17th or so. More on that later.
Google November 2023 Core Update Quick Facts:
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
- Name: Google November 2023 Broad Core Update
- Launched: November 2, 2023 at around 3 pm ET
- Rollout: Finished on November 28, 2023 at around 11:30 am ET
- Targets: It looks at all types of content
- Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
- Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
- Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but so far, this seems to be a typical core update that reaches wide and the impact is fast.
- Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
- Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's core update advice.
- Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.
Overlapping Updates: November Core & November Reviews Updates
Unlike with the October core update, we had the October 2023 spam update roll out, where Google said if you are not spamming then you weren't hit by the spam update, you were hit by the core update.
With a reviews update and a core update, that is a bit harder for Google to say. They are similar updates that can impact similar sites. So there was for sure some confusion between the two. It would be hard to know for sure if your site was hit by the November core update versus the November reviews update unless your site got hit in the first batch of the core update volatility before the reviews update touched down.
Google Tracking Tools On November 2023 Core Update:
Here is what the tools showed over the past month or so with this core and reviews update rollout:
Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):
Previous Broad Core Updates
Here is a list of the most recent core updates we've seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.
- November 2023 Core Update: November 2, 2023 through November 28, 2023
- October 2023 Core Update: October 5, 2023 through October 19, 2023
- August 2023 Core Update: August 22, 2023 through September 7, 2023
- March 2023 Core Update: March 15, 2023 through March 28, 2023
- September 2022 Core Update: September 12, 2022 through September 26, 2022
- May 2022 Core Update: May 25, 2022 through June 9, 2022
- November 2021 Core Update: November 17, 2021 through November 30, 2021
- July 2021 Core Update: July 1, 2021 through July 12, 2021
- June 2021 Core Update: June 2, 2021 through June 12, 2021
- December 2020 Core Update: December 3, 2020 through December 16, 2020
- May 2020 Core Update: May 4, 2020 through May 18, 2020
- January 2020 Core Update: January 13, 2020 through mostly January 17, 2020
- September 2019 Core Update: September 24, 2019
- Google June 2019 Core Update: June 3, 2019 through June 8, 2019
How did you all do? Hope it wasn't too bad?
Forum discussion at X and WebmasterWorld.
