Google launched two updates in December that rolled out in succession like waves carrying happy surfers to the beach and a tsunami to the unlucky few. Many SEOs who braced for SERP drama were met with a surprising impact.
Facebook Groups: The Update Was Good!
A common theme in Facebook and forum posts is that the Google Update had a positive effect that resulted in many sites hit by previous sites were returning to life all by themselves. One person reported that a number of their dormant affiliate sites suddenly awakened and were attracting traffic. Then there were some random SEOs taking credit for de-ranked client sites returning to the SERPs, leading me to wonder if they also take credit for their clients losing rankings in the first place…
Black Hat Response To Google’s Updates
The forums on Black Hat World (BHW) generally provide an indicator of how much hurt Google’s updates are handing out. Some members of BHW forum were posting about how their sites were coming back.
One member posted:
“This new update is the first update in past years for my websites to grow 🙂 For now, traffic has increased 100%+ and keeps going up…”
Another one echoed that post:
“For me it is going good for 2 days. Hope not to be bad…”
A third member shared:
“My website ranking returned today after 9 months from March update. So seams the keywords and links showing again for first time since. I was affected by the march and thought it wouldn’t recover ever again hopefully this December update once finished rolling out my site won’t be removed again”
And yet another one shared a similar experience:
“My dead website is starting to pick up keywords on ahrefs, increasing impressions on search console, but still no major change regarding traffic.”
There was one outlier who shared that their financial site lost rankings likely due to having been built on expired domains (though it’s easy to imagine other reasons).
Among the celebratory sharing was this outlier post from someone whose glass is half empty:
“Lots of sites got tanked including 3 of mine.”
Overall there was a positive tone to the black hat forum members sharing their actual experiences with Google’s December updates. That fits the pattern of what was being shared in Facebook groups, that the December updates were bringing some sites back from whatever algorithm hits they suffered in previous updates.
Then There Is The X Response.
On X, every Google update announcement is met by many comments about how big brands are the winners, spam sites are dominating the SERPs (which contradicts the first complaint), and that Google is destroying small businesses. These kinds of comments have been around for decades, from before X/Twitter. The defining characteristic of such remarks is that they are general in nature and don’t reflect anything specific about the update; they’re just venting about Google.