Google has completed the rollout of the December 2024 spam update after a seven-day rollout cycle. This update started on December 19, 2024 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on December 26, 2024. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update.
The update hit hard and fast, with lots of site owners talking about deindexing and deranking issues early on and then it stayed heated through and over Christmas. Again, this update felt like one of the bigger spam updates we have seen, in a long time, maybe ever. And it all came at probably one of the hardest times of the year to get hit by a Google Search update.
December 2024 Google Spam Update Quick Facts
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
- Name: Google December 2024 Spam Update
- Launched: December 19, 2024 at about 12:00 pm ET
- Rollout: Completed on December 26th at about 2pm ET.
- Targets: Sites violating some of the Google search spam policies.
- Does Not Target: This update does not target link spam, it does not target the site reputation abuse policy and some other policies.
- Penalty: It penalizes some of spam techniques that are against Google’s spam policies.
- Global: This is a global update impacting all regions and languages.
- Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
- Recover: If you were hit by this, Google said you should review its spam policies to ensure they are complying with those.
- Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to the spam update. It can take many months to recover, Google said.
What Google Said
Google said this is a global update that applies to all languages. Google wrote, “Released the December 2024 spam update, which applies globally and to all languages. The rollout may take up to 1 week to complete.”
Google then posted on December 26th at around 2pm ET that the update is now complete.
Google linked to its spam updates page which was updated on October 31, 2024 to read:
While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable improvements to how they work. When we do, we refer to this as a spam update and share when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates.
For example, SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. From time-to-time, we improve that system to make it better at spotting spam and to help ensure it catches new types of spam.
Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.
In the case of a link spam update (an update that specifically deals with link spam), making changes might not generate an improvement. This is because when our systems remove the effects spammy links may have, any ranking benefit the links may have previously generated for your site is lost. Any potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be regained.
The rollout was complete as of December 26, 2024.
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) December 26, 2024
More On The December 2024 Spam Update
Like I said above, the December spam update hit hard and fast, with lots of site owners talking about deindexing and deranking issues early on and then it stayed heated through and over Christmas. I covered a lot of the SEO industry chatter in those stories, so check out those stories for more and I am sure you will see some comments below as well.
This update felt like one of the bigger spam updates we have seen, in a long time, maybe ever. And it all came at probably one of the hardest times of the year to get hit by a Google Search update.
Which spam policies this enforced is not directly clear but there is a lot of speculation on it. To be honest, I am seeing a lot of people in the community saying this spam update is promoting more spam, not demoting it.
Tracking Tools On December 2024 Spam Update
We are now a week into the spam update and look how much more heated these tools are compared to the December core update. It is wild.
Previous Google Spam Updates
Here are the documented previous spam updates:
- June 2021 spam update on June 23, 2021 – one day rollout
- June 2021 spam update on June 28, 2021 – one day rollout
- July 2021 link spam update started on July 26, 2021 and completed 29 days later on August 24, 2021
- November 2021 spam update started on November 3, 2021 and completed 8 days later on November 11, 2021
- October 2022 spam update started on October 19, 2022 and completed 48 hours later on October 21, 2022
- December 2022 link spam update started on December 14, 2022 and completed 19 days later on January 12, 2023
- October 2023 spam update started on October 4, 2023 and completed 15 days later on October 20, 2023
- March 2024 spam update started on March 5, 2024 and completed 15 days later on March 20, 2024
- June 2024 spam update started on June 20, 2024 and completed 7 days later on June 27, 2024
- December 2024 spam update started on December 19, 2024 and completed 7 days later on December 26, 2024
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