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In December, Google launched two updates that followed each other like waves carrying happy surfers to the beach and a tsunami to the unlucky few. Many SEOs preparing for SERP drama have encountered a surprising impact.
A common theme in posts on Facebook and forums is that the Google Update had a positive effect that resulted in many of the previously affected sites coming back to life on their own. One person reported that a number of their dormant affiliate sites suddenly woke up and were attracting traffic. Then some random SEOs took credit for deranked client websites getting back on the SERPs, which made me wonder if they were also taking credit for their clients losing rankings in the first place…
The Black Hat World (BHW) forums generally give an indication of how much damage Google’s updates are causing. Some BHW forum members have posted about how their sites are coming back.
One member published:
“This new update is the first update in years for my website growth 🙂 So far traffic is up 100%+ and continues to grow…”
Another he echoed that post:
“I’m doing well for 2 days. I hope it won’t be bad…”
The third member divided:
“My website ranking is back today after 9 months since the update in March. So the keywords and links are showing up again for the first time since then. I was affected by the march and thought it would never recover. I hope this December update after my site is done setting up won’t be removed again.”
And one more divided similar experience:
“My dead website is starting to pick up keywords on ahrefs, increasing search console impressions, but still no big change in terms of traffic.”
There was one exception who shared that their financial site lost rankings probably because it was built on expired domains (though it’s easy to imagine other reasons).
Among the celebratory shares was this unusual post from someone whose glass is half empty:
“Many pages were destroyed, including 3 of mine.”
Overall, there was a positive tone among members of the black hat forum sharing their real experiences with Google’s December updates. This fits the pattern of what has been shared in Facebook groups, that the December updates brought back some websites from whatever algorithm suffered in previous updates.
On X, every update announcement from Google is followed by many comments about how the big brands are the winners, spammy pages dominate the SERPs (contrary to the first complaint), and how Google is destroying small businesses. Comments like this have been around for decades, before X/Twitter. The defining characteristic of such remarks is that they are general in nature and do not reflect anything specific about the update; they just spread about Google.
The response to Google’s announcement of an update to the X was, as expected, negative. I’m not mad when I say the responses have been predictably negative, that’s literally been the consistent tone for every update announcement Google makes on X.
It’s Google destroying small businesses:
“…How is it possible that every update since September 23rd has destroyed the traffic of small/medium publishers while at the same time boosting corporate websites spewing top 10 trash content.”
Google updates consistently use reddit:
“Just Call It What It Is: The Gift of More Traffic to Reddit Update #94”
and Google destroyed my business listing:
“I used to work independently, write blogs and earn a decent income. I even believed that I would never need a traditional job in my life. But thanks to Google, which deleted my websites one after another, I am now left with no income, no motivation and no job. Thanks Google”
Again, I’m not discounting the experiences of the people making those posts. I’m just pointing out that none of those posts reflect experiences specific to the December Google Updates. These are general statements about Google’s algorithms.
Outstanding opinions
As with everything else, there are some opinions that are outside the box, outside the norm of what many people experience. For example, there are some extremists who have been posting that the update is big. But there are always some people who say that for every update. Although 2024 was a year of massive change, these posts for December 2024 do not represent a definite consensus on the Google Core Algorithm Update and Spam Update.
I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe it’s just a statistical inevitability.
It seems clear that Google has reverted something in the algorithm that has been suppressing the rankings of many websites. It’s my opinion that Google’s algorithms for determining whether a site is “search engine friendly” were too harsh on expert sites by people whose poor understanding of SEO resulted in otherwise high-quality, keyword-laden, high-traffic sites, sometimes showing accurate matches with keywords shown in People also asked. This, in my opinion, results in a “made for search engine” look. Could it be that Google has tweaked that algorithm to be a little more forgiving of content spam like it is for link spam?
Something to note is that this update was followed by an anti-spam update, which could be an improved classifier to catch spammy websites that may have been released by the core algorithm update, while expert sites remained in search results.
The CEO of Google recently stated that 2025 will be a year of great change. If the two December updates are representative of what’s to come, it could be that the announced changes may not be as drastic as the series of updates in 2024. We can hope, right?