The Google December 2024 core update and the December 2024 spam updates are both complete, but yet, the Google search ranking volatility is still intensely heated. It feels like one or both of these update never ended and it continues to cause heated ranking volatility the week following the end of the last Google update of 2024.
It has been a volatile year of Google algorithm updates, more so with the unconfirmed updates, since we had fewer confirmed Google updates in 2024 than we did the past four years. And this week is no different.
Google Search Volatility Tracking Tools
As you can see from these tools, Google Search has not calmed down after the completion of both the spam and core updates. In fact, it is pretty much as heated as it was during these updates. The question is why...
SEO Chatter
The SEO chatter is a bit calmer but a lot of people have been off the following week. Here is some of the recent chatter at WebmasterWorld over the past couple of days.
No idea what Google is doing, but the supposed updates don't seem over yet, there are wild swings from day to day and even hour to hour now. Saturday was -24% with traffic low all day. Sunday shot up with traffic high all day until late in the eve. Today traffic is right back down with USA traffic at -25% at 1pm. My articles are down by as much as 72% today. I also received an unusually high number of inquiries this weekend. Unfortunately, most of them were so delusional in their price expectations that I deleted them as they came in without responding. I have a field in my forms where people can state their budget if they choose to...it's a real time saver!
Our Google traffic has been up significantly in the last few days (as has our non-Google traffic). But I think this has more to do with seasonal demand than with Google updates, since we always see the curve head upwards in late December.
Traffic over here is good. It tends to increase during holiday periods. However, revenue and RPM is terrible. I have had better RPM with less traffic.
Since Christmas, there has been an extremely high amount of discover traffic every day. The last few days have been the best days for my news page all year, but unfortunately the ranking is still completely mixed up. If the news traffic decreases, it will look very bad.
We were expecting an uptrend for the end of december for our travel site. That actually came, which is good. BUT: The volatillity is still high and way higher than I expected. Moreover, in one hour there are for example 80 visits and in the next our its just 20. First I was thinking that maybe the realtime tracking in GA has a bug. But the cycles come and go. Is anyone else observing something like this?To you all: Have a great start in the new year!
What are you all seeing?
Wishing you a New Year of growth, if that is possible.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
