Google December 2024 Spam Update ?? Rollout Shocks Before Holidays

Google has released the December 2024 spam update one day after the December 2024 core update was completed and just days before the big year-end holiday break. This release likely surprised most of us, but at this point, I guess nothing should surprise us.

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."

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: Will take about a week to fully rollout.
• 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.

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 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.

Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-december-2024-spam-update-38608.html?