SEO news - December 2024

1. December 2024 Core update

Google’s December 2024 Core Update was announced on 12th December and is part of ongoing efforts to improve the relevance and quality of search results. This is happening only a week after the November 2024 Core Update had finished rolling out. The aim of this update is to show more content to users that they find genuinely useful, improving Google’s ability to match user search queries with relevant intent and context.

What does this mean for SEO?

At present, it is still unclear what impact the update will have on search and page ranking. However, it’s important to continue creating original, high-quality and engaging content that is optimised for E-E-A-T to maintain or improve page authority and ranking. Any thin or outdated content may see drops in ranking as well as sites that overuse AI-generated content.

Update: Google also rolled out the December 2024 spam update on 19th December. The rollout may take up to one week to complete. Most sites will not be impacted as this will most likely target sites violating Google’s spam policies.

2. Crackdown on ‘Parasite SEO’ content

Parasite SEO content refers to a practice where publishers exploit third-party domains or create low-quality content on high-authority platforms to manipulate search rankings. Google has introduced an amendment to their spam policies to combat this, aiming to preserve the integrity of search results by cracking down on irrelevant, misleading and deceptive content that undermines user trust.

Key changes to Google’s spam policy

• Policy expansion: Hosting irrelevant or off-brand content, even with the consent of the host domain will now violate its search policies.

• Targeted practices: Activities like publishing low-value content onto authoritative domains to gain backlinks or rankings are now under stricter scrutiny.

• Algorithm adjustments: Google has improved its ability to detect and lower the ranking of parasite SEO pages in SERPs, and sites participating in these practices are at risk of penalties.

Implications for digital marketing and SEO

If you’re creating relevant and original content, you should have nothing to worry about. Companies relying on manipulative tactics will need to change their strategy to align with Google’s evolving standards, otherwise they may find that their pages drop in ranking and have reduced visibility.

3. Gemini 2.0 launch

The newest version of Google’s AI, Gemini 2.0 Flash, launched on 11th December and the experimental model is currently only available to developers and trusted testers, with a view to broaden availability in early 2025. It’s a general improvement on the previous model, outperforming Gemini 1.5 Pro on key benchmarks at twice the speed.

Highlights of Gemini 2.0

• Enhanced multimodal capabilities: Gemini 2.0 can support multimodal inputs, including text, image, audio and video, allowing users to make targeted searches with increased accuracy.

• Content optimisation insights: User queries are analysed more deeply, offering advanced keyword suggestions and content recommendations for improved SEO.

• AI-generated summaries: Early next year, Google is expecting to integrate Gemini 2.0 with its AI overviews. It should be able to tackle more complex topics, maths equations and multi-step questions.

Advantages of Gemini 2.0

• The improved results will be more relevant and improve user satisfaction when searching.

• Gemini-powered tools can be used by businesses to create AI-enhanced, SEO-friendly content more efficiently and cost-effectively, saving time and resources.

• Advanced AI insights improve keyword strategy by identifying long-tail opportunities and semantic clusters.

• Businesses may see an improved conversion rate for customers as users benefit from more precise and comprehensive search results.

Disadvantages of Gemini 2.0

• As we’ve seen with AI summaries previously, the click-through rate is negatively impacted, and organic traffic is reduced to websites as users obtain the information they needed without clicking.

• Alongside the usual contenders, businesses have to compete with AI-generated overviews and create new strategies for this.

• Websites that don’t utilise multimodal content may start to see a dip in their rankings.

4. Google’s Year in Search 2024 report

Google’s Year in Search Report for 2024 provides a compilation of the most popular search trends and topics globally or by country throughout the year. Besides being interesting to read through, understanding and utilising trends for SEO can be a great strategy for creating up-to-date and topical content.

Year in Search report highlights

• Trending topics: The top global trending searches were sports related with Copa America, UEFA European Championship and ICC Men’s T20 World Cup being the top three. In entertainment, high-profile or controversial films and music dominated the category, such as Inside Out 2 and Baby Reindeer.

• Search evolution: Google noted a rise in voice searches and multimodal queries where text and image inputs were combined, as well as Google Lens which was mostly used for translating, shopping or identifying things.

• UK insights: When comparing the trending searches of 2024 between the UK and rest of the world, they didn’t greatly differ with a similar mix of searches in each category. Interestingly, the top search term in the UK was Euros, compared to the global search for the same event being the more formal UEFA European Championship.

How can we utilise trending topics for SEO?

Understanding behavioural insights and what people are searching for can help in strategic content planning by aligning strategies with trending topics to increase relevance and engagement. Whether you’re interested in the hot topics globally or locally, it can be useful to create content and gain more visibility by tapping into emerging opportunities. However, visibility may be short lived if you create an overreliance on trends, with search volume decreasing at the end of the trend’s lifespan. These popular topics may also have an oversaturation of content with many competitors trying to jump on the bandwagon as well.