SEOIntel Weekly News Round-up (Third Week of December 2024)

As we approach the third week of December, Google has launched the December 2024 spam update, which aims to enhance spam detection and follows the recent completion of the December core update, marking a significant effort to combat unhelpful content. Additionally, Google introduced its new AI model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which focuses on reasoning capabilities. That and more in this week’s notable SEO news. Read more about them below:

Google has launched the December 2024 Spam Update

Google announced the December 2024 spam update, which was released yesterday (December 19, 2024) and aims to combat search spam globally across all languages. This update is expected to be fully implemented within a week and coincides with the holiday season, although it is unlikely to impact sites that adhere to Google’s spam guidelines. Notably, this rollout follows the completion of the December 2024 core update just a day prior, marking it as part of a series of updates designed to enhance Google’s spam detection and prevention measures throughout the year.

The rollout of the December 2024 Core Update by Google is now complete

Google announced the last core update of 2024 has been fully implemented, marking the conclusion of the December on December 12, 2024, the update was completed on December 18, 2024, after a 6 day deployment period. As part of its ongoing efforts to enhance search result accuracy, Google utilized this update to refine its core ranking algorithm, aiming to provide users with more pertinent and useful information.

Here are some charts illustrating the volatility during this update.

Google December 2024 Core Update Quick Facts:

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

• Name: Google December 2024 Broad Core Update
• Launched: December 12, 2024 at around 10:46 am ET
• Rollout: Completed December 18, 2024 at around 2:00 pm ET
• 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 – updating some of the “core systems”.
• 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 December 2024 Core Update Details

Google didn’t say much specific about this December 2024 core update. Google did say, “we have different core systems we’re always improving.” So this update should differ from the November core update but how it is different, is not clear. I don’t know if this will help those the folks who went to the creator summit or not.

So it seems like it is more of the same:

• Show more content that people find genuinely useful.
• Show less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

Google has launched its own Artificial Intelligence model focused on “reasoning“

Google announce the launched of a new experimental AI model called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, designed to enhance reasoning capabilities in various complex tasks. This model is accessible through AI Studio, Google’s platform for AI prototyping, and is optimized for multimodal understanding, logical reasoning, and programming. It aims to tackle intricate problems in fields like coding, mathematics, and physics by breaking down challenges into smaller components and providing explanations for its thought processes. Despite its potential, initial testing suggests that there is still room for improvement in its performance.

In a post in X, Logan Kilpatrick, the product lead for AI Studio, described this model as a significant milestone in Google’s journey towards advanced reasoning. Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind, noted that the model is trained to leverage cognitive processes to enhance problem-solving abilities. While Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking offers promising advancements, it also faces limitations such as longer response times and constraints on input and output tokens. Overall, the introduction of this reasoning model positions Google as a competitor in the evolving landscape of AI technologies focused on improved decision-making capabilities.