Google’s surprise December 2024 spam update has finally rolled out completely, marking an end to a seven-day long rollout. This pretty big and widespread update was targeted at websites that were in violation of some of the Google search spam policies.
However, this update has hit websites across the globe, with many owners complaining about deindexing and deranking issues early on, holding its momentum through Christmas. In social media, the chatter is all about how this update has blindsided many, and the initial responses reveal how this update has had adverse effects, by promoting spam rather than demoting them.
It has been a year of algorithmic updates with Google launching seven in 2024, with the last three launching between November & December. We are keeping an eye on this update and see how it pans out, going forward into 2025. Stay tuned.
Google announced the rollout of a new spam update on December 19, 2024. The timing is notable as it arrives closely on the heels of the December 2024 core update released just a week earlier. With the holiday season poised to commence soon, it is likely to be the final major update of 2024, as Google typically pauses significant updates during this period.
While the core update’s impact was felt across multiple industries, the spam update aims to target specific websites and content violating Google’s spam policies. This December update wraps up a year of spam-fighting efforts, which included March core, and June spam update. These actions collectively aimed to penalize sites that violate policies and reduce unhelpful content by 40%.
To ensure your site stays compliant with the search engine guidelines and updates, consider partnering with a provider of SEO consulting services.
The December Spam Update Announcement Details
The search giant posted this announcement on X, saying,
“Today we released the December 2024 spam update. It may take up to 1 week to complete, and we’ll post on the Google Search Status Dashboard when the rollout is done”
On search dashboard, they included a link to their standard spam updates documentation, which mentions:
“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.”
Actionable Tips for Webmasters
As mentioned earlier, spam updates primarily target policy-violating sites, particularly those engaging in abusive, manipulative, and harmful search practices. As a result, not all websites will be equally affected by this update. According to the search engine guidelines, website owners must avoid engaging inœ major deceptive tactics such as the following that could result in penalties or demotion in search results.
- Cloaking
- Doorway abuse
- Expired domain abuse
- Hacked content
- Hidden text and link abuse
- Keyword stuffing
- Link spam
- Machine-generated traffic
- Malware and malicious practices
- Misleading functionality
- Scaled content abuse
- Scraping
- Sneaky redirects
- Site reputation abuse
- Thin affiliation
- User-generated spam
Other minor practices include legal removals, personal information removals, policy circumvention, and scam and fraud. If website owners observe any potential negative effects of the latest update on their websites, Google recommends conducting a thorough review for detection of violation of search policies. As checking your site for search engine policy violations is a demanding task, hiring a search engine optimization company is a reliable and strategic option.
