January 2025 Google Webmaster Report: Core & Spam Updates, Gemini AI, Bugs, Exploits & Site Reputation Abuse

Google Webmaster Report

Talk about a busy month - the last 30 days has been pretty wild. We had the November 2024 core update finish in December, then we had a new December 2024 core update start and finish, while also having the December 2024 spam update start and finish in December as well. That is not to say anything has calmed down since the last official Google algorithm update of 2024 finished, it has not, it is crazy volatile. The crazy part, we are expecting a lot more core updates in 2025.

Google's CEO spoke about how search will profoundly change in 2025 and then urged its employees to scale Gemini to consumers in a big way next year. This, all while, Google is testing Gemini 2.0 powered AI Overviews in Google Search and we saw hints of AI mode in Google Search, including attaching files to Google Search.

Google had another indexing issue with Google Search in December, and even Google Lens had a serving issue last month. But Google Search Console added a new 24-hour view, amongst many other changes. Oh, and some personalizations changes may be afloat for Google, which we speculated the previous month.

A major Google exploit with end points revealed some interesting ranking signals. Google added FAQs for site reputation abuse, possibly leading to Forbes cutting freelancer writers. We have a ton of new SEO details and documentation from Google over the past month as well.

There was just a lot and the more important links are below:

Google December Spam Update:

Google December Core Update:

Google November Spam Update:

January 2025 Google Webmaster Report