Google’s November 2024 core update is now done rolling out, a Google spokesperson told us. It started on November 11, 2024 and completed about 24 days later on December 5, 2024. This update was a typical core update where Google updates its core ranking system to make search results more relevant and helpful.
What Google said. Google said about this core update:
“This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”
What we saw. Based on what I’ve been tracking, this update started to be felt a couple of days after it was announced on November 13th and 14th, and then seemed to hit a wider set of sites this past weekend, around November 16th and 17th. Towards the end of this update, many of the tracking tools showed relatively low ranking volatility but then we saw a large spike in volatility around November 25th and 26th. We even saw significant movement over the past few days, in early December. We thought this update would be done before the Black Friday shopping season, but it was not completed beforehand and well into the following week.
Here are some charts showing the volatility over this update:
This does not seem to be the largest Google core update, Google said the March 2024 core update was that. But this was indeed a core update and if your site was affected by this update, it would have seen big swings in its search rankings in Google..
Previous communication. Google told us weeks ago that an update was coming soon but websites negatively impacted by the September 2023 helpful content update should not expect to see big recoveries. It is too soon to know what type of impact this November core update will have.
What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. Google has not really given much new advice here but here is the past advice the company provided: