The response to Google’s update announcement on X was predictably negative. I’m not being snarky when I say the responses were predictably negative, that’s literally the consistent tone for every update announcement that Google makes on X.
Representative posts:
Google is destroying small businesses:
“…How is it possible every update since September 23 has destroyed the traffic of small/medium publishers while boosting corp websites that put out top 10s trash content.”
Google updates consistently benefit Reddit:
“Just call it what it is: The Gift More Traffic to Reddit Update #94”
And the Google destroyed my business post:
“I used to work independently, writing blogs and earning a decent income. I even believed I would never need a traditional job in my life. But thanks to Google, which wiped out my websites one after another, I’m now left with no income, no motivation and no job. Thank you Google”
Again, I am not minimizing the experiences of the people making those posts. I am just pointing out that none of those posts reflect experiences specific to the December Google updates. They are general statements about Google’s algorithms.
Outlier Opinions
Same as with everything else, there are also some opinions that are outliers, outside of the norms of what many people are experiencing. For example, there are some outliers who were posting that the update was big. But there are always some people saying that for every update. Although 2024 was a year of massive change, those outlier posts for the December 2024 don’t represent a certain consensus formed about the Google Core algorithm update and the spam update.
I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe it’s just a statistical inevitability.
Google’s Core Algorithm Update: What Happened?
It feels clear that Google dialed back something in the algorithm that was suppressing the rankings of many websites. It’s been my opinion that Google’s algorithms that determine if a site is “made for search engines” has been overly hard on expert sites by people whose poor understanding of SEO resulted in otherwise high quality sites laden with high traffic keywords, sometimes showing exact matches to keywords shown in People Also Asked. That, in my opinion, results in a “made for search engines” kind of look. Could it be that Google tweaked that algorithm to be a little more forgiving of “content spam” so that it ignores it and let’s the content speak for itself just as Google does for link spam?
Something to consider is that this update was followed by an anti-spam update, which could be an improved classifier to catch the spam sites that may have been set loose by the core algorithm update, while leaving the expert sites in the search results.
What About 2025?
Google’s CEO recently stated that 2025 would be a year of major changes. If the two December updates are representative of what’s coming in the future it could be that the heralded changes may not be as harsh as the series of updates in 2024. We can hope, right?
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