Industry News

As you know, the December 2024 core update was announced on December 12, 2024 at around 10:46 am ET and Google said it would take about two weeks to complete. Well, this update seemed to have touched down, landed, over this weekend. There is a lot of volatility reported in the Google search results and with that, a lot of chatter within the SEO community.

Hanukkah (aka Chanukah) starts pretty late this year, compared to other years. The holiday starts Wednesday, December 25th. And Google has already added its Hanukkah decorations for his year, while Christmas starts the day before and Kwanzaa the day after - but both Christmas and Kwanzaa decorations are not live on Google yet.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google surprised us with the rollout of the December 2024 core update. Google said core updates will now happen more often...

Google began rolling out the December 2024 core update yesterday. Google said more core updates will come more often in the future. We are still seeing Google search ranking volatility all week long, starting over the weekend. Google confirmed it had a short indexing bug...

Google surprised most of us with a new core update being announced yesterday, only a week after the November 2024 core update finished rolling out. This new December 2024 core update will take about two weeks to roll out and seems to be a normal core update that is updating one of the core systems that may have not been updated in the November release.

Google held its Google Search Central Live event at its large Zurich office (where the Search Central team is based) and one of the things presented was that Google will be having more core updates, more often. So I guess instead of the three or four core updates Google announces per year, Google may have more of them per year.

Google Ads is beta testing its new AI tools to generate reports by asking Google for the report you want. You enter a prompt, or just a normal English request, and Google Ads will generate a report based on your request.

Google Lens stopped working for all users for a short period of time yesterday morning (NY time). Google confirmed the issue at 9:46am ET on Thursday, December 12th and then within the hour, they mitigated the issue.

Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, confirmed that campaign-level negative keywords are now in beta for Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads. She added that this will expand in 2025 to more accounts.

Several weeks ago, Google announced it would test changes to the search results for hotels in order to see how the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in Europe would impact hotels. Well, that test is wrapped and the results were not good for hotels, says Google.