The search giant closed 2024 with a bang, rolling out not one but two significant updates to its algorithm: Google’s December Core Update and Spam Update. These modifications, part of a series of seven major updates this year, brought about notable changes in the search engine’s rankings.
Let’s take a look at the facts and decipher the main findings.
Google’s December 2024 Core Update: focus on relevance and quality
While the last Core Update only began on November 11, Google has taken the SEO world by surprise by launching a new Core Update on December 12. This is the fourth Core Update of the year!
Following on from previous adjustments, it aims to improve the relevance of search results and the user experience. The impact of this update on the SERP appears to be greater than that of November, and it has particularly affected several sectors: e-commerce, community platforms, news sites… Some sites have seen their visitor volume drop by up to 75%.
Observed trends
- Sites offering original content saw their positions improve.
- On the other hand, sites offering overly automated content, translated URLs or content that doesn’t match search intentions have plummeted to the bottom of the SERP.
- The same is true of « Christmas trees » sites crammed with ads, detracting from the user experience, and new sites.
- Content from high-authority sites seems to be preferred.
In short, Google is once again emphasizing content quality and user experience.
Implications for SEO professionals
This update reinforces the need to:
- Produce original, factual content with high added value, enhanced by images and videos when this improves the quality of the response to search intent.
- Improve the E-E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, Experience) of your pages.
- Clearly respond to search intent.
- Reassess internationalization strategies, especially if they rely on automatically translated content.
Google’s December 2024 Spam Update: practices to avoid
Following on from the Core Update in December, the American giant launched its third Spam Update 2024. Deployed from December 19 to 26, its main objective was to combat abusive SEO practices, through improvements to SpamBrain, Google’s anti-spam artificial intelligence tool.
The risk for targeted sites? Downgrading or even complete de-indexing of SERP pages.
Zoom in on the objectives of this update
It aims to penalize the following practices:
- Creation of doorway pages: pages created solely to manipulate rankings, with no real value for the user.
- Putting automated content online: texts generated on a large scale by AI tools, without human control.
- SEO parasite: techniques using third-party domains to propel misleading or opportunistic content.
Some sites have lost 70% of their traffic, even though they say they don’t use AI to generate content or buy links. Could this be due to translated content or 100% AI-generated content?
SEO implications
The impacts of this update are varied:
- Loss of traffic, at a crucial time for some e-tailers.
- Sites adopting dubious practices have seen their visibility drastically reduced.
- Efforts to produce quality, engaging content that is useful to Internet users are more rewarded.
- Webmasters need to reinforce their strategies to avoid any suspicion of spam (for example, avoid over-optimization of link anchors).
A year rich in updates: what’s the outlook for 2024?
With seven major updates in 2024, Google continued to refine its algorithm, to offer ever more relevant and reliable search results in a context where competition from AI tools and social networks is raging.
Each update brings its own set of challenges for SEO professionals:
- This year’s Core Updates have consistently emphasized E-E-A-T and content relevance.
- Spam Updates, on the other hand, show that Google is stepping up its efforts to identify and penalize non-compliant practices.
Tips for optimizing your SEO in 2025
To start the new year with serenity:
- Focus your efforts on high-quality content that meets users’ needs.
- Avoid SEO shortcuts: short-term strategies can cost you in the long run.
- Keep a close eye on changes in Google’s guidelines and adapt your strategies accordingly.
In conclusion
Yes, Google’s rules of the game aren’t always clear-cut, and yes, updates sometimes come as a bolt from the blue. But some things never change: quality, ethics and user-friendliness are at the heart of SEO.
In short, nothing new: user experience, user experience, user experience. In case you didn’t quite understand 😅: USER EXPERIENCE!
Write to answer your personas’ questions, provide exclusive and relevant content that people want to read, update your previous content, monitor the quality of your backlinks and the speed of your site. So, if you work on your three SEO pillars (technical, content and trust), everything will be all right!
