Google announced the November Core Update on the 11th November 2024. The roll-out took over three weeks and Google did not provide any additional information about the features of the update. This page shows data and examples of domains that were impacted by the update and the additional site reputation abuse update.
This is the fifth major update of 2024, the last being the Core Update in August 2024 where the separate “Helpful Content” updates were already part of the core ranking algorithm.
- Google’s status page for the November Core Update. (Roll-out completed on the 5th December 2024)
- For detail information and data on all Google updates, see the SISTRIX update tracking page.
- Start a free trial with SISTRIX here.
SISTRIX data
The daily view on SERP updates can always be viewed in our Google Update Radar which shows the current level of movement relative to the last 90 days. The radar graphic for UK and US is shown below.
Thar radar, an indicator of SERPs changes across 1 million SERPs every day, showed little immediate activity after the announcement on the 11th. The first significant changes were seen on the 15th November for affected domains and then again after the additional site reputation abuse update late in November.
Domain risers. Changes start on 15th November
Many sites followed this curve after the 14th December, indicating that they were affected by the Core Update.
A similar pattern occurs in the US.
Site reputation abuse update – November 2024
In a separate action, Google tightened the rules and implemented penalties for some domains. Some examples show very significant losses. The largest loss is at the forbes.com domain where the /advisor directory URLs were removed from search results.
Here’s a closer look at the directory in UK search, where the same impact was seen. An initial rise following the Core Update roll-out was followed by the penalty.
The US news media site cnn.com has also suffered losses in its relatively new CNN Underscored project.
Some long-standing affiliate marketing projects are still stable though. Good Housekeeping (+4.6% over 30 days), Indy Best (/extras, +2.7% over 30 days) and BBC Good Food (/review +1.49% over 30 days.)
For those following Reddit (our analysis here), there’s no major change in the domain visibility for UK or US.
News media
Until the 21st November the sector was flat but the change seen after that date has negatively affected news media sites. Across 77 news media domains we saw the following top rising and falling domains.
Retail in UK search
In our keyword-led Visibility Leaders sector tracker for retail ‘know’ and ‘do’ keywords, we see that the ‘do’, commercial-intent tracker is largely unchanged:
In the ‘know’ tracker, there are movements that can be seen towards the end of November. Amazon.co.uk has been removed from the graph for scaling purposes. (Amazon.co.uk current sector VI: 543.97)
The changes seen are related to the large movement of SERPs following the implementation of the Site Reputation Abuse action. (Where there are losers, there will also be winners.)
Additional examples
In the US data there are also examples. One of the bigger examples is luxuryhotel.world, a relatively new site run from Sweden.
A filtered list of keywords lost from top 3 positions in the Google search US shows major click potential being lost.
Other falling domains also show a similar change in trend:
More examples are shown in the table of filtered ‘fallers’ below.
