December 2024 Google Core Update: analytics and winner and loser sites
Celebration or sorrow? If December has always been the month of budgets, this year Google decided to put the load on, unleashing the December 2024 Core Update right on the heels of the holidays and just seven days after the completion of the November 2024 Core Update. This update, moreover, had a very fast rollout (completed in less than a week) and extraordinary impact, moving the SERPs with a power not seen in a long time, which did not allow much room to recover from the “earthquake” of the previous update. In short, 2024 came to a close among SEO professionals and webmasters divided between those who toasted their achievements and those who saw months of hard work fade away under the weight of volatility. But why two core updates so close together and a new update so turbulent? More importantly, what lessons can we learn from its effects to better prepare ourselves? We analyze as usual the core of the algorithmic intervention, with an overview of affected industries and cases of the most emblematic winner and loser sites.
December 2024 Google Core Update, the surprise update
Before we delve into the data, let’s do a little recap of general information.
The December 2024 Core Update is the fourth major algorithmic update released by Google this year, announced on December 12, 2024 and officially concluded just six days later, on December 18. This update, like all core updates, represents a significant overhaul of Google’s core systems that determine page rankings in search results. The stated goal is to further improve the quality and relevance of SERPs by showing more useful content and reducing the visibility of content that does not meet Google’s standards.
What distinguished the update, however, was the timing management, and in particular the exceptional speed of the rollout and its temporal proximity to the November 2024 Core Update, completed just seven days earlier. Such a close sequence is a rare occurrence and has raised numerous questions in the SEO community, both because of the intensity and the apparent urgency of these algorithmic changes.