Google's Big December 2024 Spam Update Finished Rolling Out

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.

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.

Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-december-2024-spam-update-done-38641.html?