Google November 2024 Core Update Roll Out
Google has begun rolling out the third core update for the year, the November 2024 core update. This update started to roll out on November 11, 2024 at around 3:30 pm and will take about two weeks to complete rolling out. This seems like a typical core update, without any new specifics about what changed or what improved.
We knew this update was coming – and it finally arrived yesterday afternoon. Google also told us not to expect HCU victim sites to recover with this update.
So far, we are seeing some folks suggest their rankings went down even more. But the vast majority of people are saying they are not seeing movement as of yet, as of the time I published this story. Of course, I will keep track of the chatter and let you know what people are seeing over the coming days. In addition, the volatility tracking tools are mostly all showing normal volatility – so maybe this has not kicked in as of yet.
And yes, it was released on the Veterans Day US holiday, but it seems like it was released well before the big holiday shopping season, post-Thanksgiving holiday.
Google posted this update on LinkedIn and X and wrote:
Today we released the November 2024 core update to Google Search.
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.
We’ll update our ranking release history page in the near future, and update it when the rollout is complete. For more information about core updates, please see here.
The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.
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
- Rollout: Will take about two weeks to roll out
- 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
Google didn’t say much specific about this November 2024 core update. Google did say, “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.”
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.
Yes, a lot of joking in the SEO community about these statements. Yep, it sounds a lot like the helpful content update statements… Yes, the helpful content update is no more, it’s part of core updates now, in some sense…
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 and will take about two weeks to roll out.
- 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
Previous Unconfirmed Updates
We had a ton of unconfirmed updates between the August 2024 and November 2024 core update. I won’t list them all, but you can scan them over here.
As a reminder, Google did tell us that an search update is coming soon. The last time we reported on an update was when I named it the Google Election 2024 unconfirmed update and before that was the Google Halloween 2024 Google search update and then before that on October 23, 24 and 26 and 27th and before that, October 19th and 20th volatility and then on October 15th, October 10th and then before that on October 2nd which lasted a couple of days. The Google August 2024 core update started on August 15th and officially completed on September 3rd. But it was still super volatile the day after it completed and also weeks after it completed and it has not cooled.
We saw big signals on and around September 6th, September 10th or so and maybe around September 14th. We also saw movement around September 18th, last weekend and Septmeber 25th and September 28th or so.
For more information and access to a load of graphs to support what’s happened to date, visit the Search Engine Roundtable – the source of this post.