The Google November 2024 core update finally finished rolling out yesterday at around 1:30 PM ET. It took over 23.5 days to roll out, starting on November 11, 2024 at 3:30 pm and finishing on December 5, 2024 at 1:30 pm. The Google algorithm update was expected to take two weeks to roll out but took almost twice as long.
Google posted saying, "The rollout was complete as of December 5, 2024."
This was the third core update of 2024 and likely the last one for this year.
Google November 2024 Core Update Quick Facts:
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
- Name: Google November 2024 Broad Core Update
- Launched: November 11, 2024 at around 3:30 pm ET
- Completed: December 5, 2024 at around 1:30 pm ET (23 days and 13 hours)
- Targets: It looks at all types of content
- Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
- Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
- Impact: The normal core update stuff around helpful content.
- Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
- Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's core update advice.
- Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.
Google November 2024 Core Update Details
When Google announced the November 2024 core update update, Google wrote, "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."
Here are the tweets:
This roll-out is now complete.
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) December 5, 2024
What We Saw With The November 2024 Core Update
Here are the stories we wrote specific to the Google November 2024 core update. The Google November 2024 core update started rolling out Monday, November 11, at 3:30 pm ET and we saw some movement begin around November 13 and 14th but it was not that widespread. Then over November 16th or so we saw much more movement and volatility. Then it calmed down over the second week of the update until November 25th and 26th and even on the 27th and 28th, Thanksgiving weekend. We then saw thinks spike up again earlier this week, around December 3rd or so.
We also had Google expand the site reputation abuse policy, which lead to a lot of manual actions on some larger sites.
Google Tracking Tools On November 2024 Core Update
The update took about 24 days to roll out, so here are those volatility tracking tools and what they showed:
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the chatter from the SEO industry at WebmasterWorld, here and more:
The update is complete. According to Google, this should have improved search quality. Seriously though, can you see an improvement? I can only see the opposite.
So we can probably assume major volatility within the next week or two?
As an SEO, I monitor a lot of sites. And I can tell you that porn sites are getting smashed in this update. Any independent porn sites with videos already on other domains are generally getting hammered. Probably my fault on that one. My bad.
I think it ended on Monday December 2nd as traffic has been increasing these past few days. Still, as per usual, G forgot to return the missing traffic and I'm still -20% down. Could be worse I guess. But what was meant as a 2-week ''update'' ended up lasting an entire month and for what exactly? As mentioned I do not see any improvements. Just an excuse to destroy more websites for their own profits. It did end just after both Black Friday and Cyber Monday after all.
Years ago Google had spoke about lowering quality standards to get users to search more, and that's what this core update may continue to build upon (reducing quality for higher profits). No surprise that our traffic is lower and conversions are more difficult to come by.
First day I have seen relatively normal traffic patterns, but not great. Some categories still -80%. But it seems to be recovering very slowly. If this sh!t happens once a month now we are looking at half the month with poor traffic and no customers...
seems more shuffling tonight. lol. You can't make this up.
Previous Broad Core Updates
Here is a list of the most recent core updates we've seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.
- November 2024 Core update: November 11, 2024 through December 5, 2024
- August 2024 Core Update : August 15, 2024 through September 3, 2024
- March 2024 Core Update : March 5, 2024 through April 19, 2024
- November 2023 Core Update : November 2, 2023 through November 28, 2023
- October 2023 Core Update: October 5, 2023 through October 19, 2023
- August 2023 Core Update: August 22, 2023 through September 7, 2023
- March 2023 Core Update: March 15, 2023 through March 28, 2023
- September 2022 Core Update: September 12, 2022 through September 26, 2022
- May 2022 Core Update: May 25, 2022 through June 9, 2022
- November 2021 Core Update: November 17, 2021 through November 30, 2021
- July 2021 Core Update: July 1, 2021 through July 12, 2021
- June 2021 Core Update: June 2, 2021 through June 12, 2021
- December 2020 Core Update: December 3, 2020 through December 16, 2020
- May 2020 Core Update: May 4, 2020 through May 18, 2020
- January 2020 Core Update: January 13, 2020 through mostly January 17, 2020
- September 2019 Core Update: September 24, 2019
- Google June 2019 Core Update: June 3, 2019 through June 8, 2019
Previous Helpful Content Update Impact
Here is the list of the previous Google helpful content updates:
- Septemebr 14, 2023 - September 2023 Google helpful content update - completing on Septmeber 28, 2023
- December 5, 2022 - December 2022 Google helpful content update, completing on January 12, 2023
- August 25, 2022 - August 2022 (original) Google helpful content update, completing on September 9, 2022
So what are you all observing with this update? Did Google "improve the quality of our search results"?
