On November 11, 2024 Google announced it was rolling out with the November 2024 Core Update.
Unlike the previous update (the August 2024 Core Update), the November update took longer to complete than Google initially estimated. While Google stated that the update would take two weeks, it officially marked the November rollout as completed on December 5th—over three weeks after its initial launch.
This was a complicated update to analyze, so let’s dive into it.
Analyzing the Impact and Trends of the November 2024 Core Update
Like the August 2024 Core Update, there was a significant amount of rank volatility leading up to the November 2024 Core Update.
In an almost ironic twist, the trends before the update were shown to be more volatile than during the update, according to the Semrush Sensor:
Comparatively, during the August 2024 Core Update, rank volatility remained consistently high throughout the update, despite the pre-update volatility.
The Semrush Sensor showing spikes of very high rank volatility leading into the August 2024 Core Update
For the record, and to be very clear, the data above (and what follows) does not imply that sites impacted by the November 2024 Core Update experienced less ranking loss than those affected by the pre-update volatility. The data presented is aggregate, intended as a general representation of the web. It does not reflect how individual sites were impacted by the update.
With that clarified, let’s continue comparing the November 2024 Core Update to the August 2024 Core Update.
I want to begin with the 60-day rank volatility trends, as they highlight the challenges of analyzing the November 2024 Core Update through aggregate data.
Below, you can see that the trend immediately leading up to the August 2024 Core Update showed an increase in rank volatility:
While the rank scenario during the August 2024 Core Update was complex (as discussed in my analysis of that update), it pales in comparison to the trends observed (in yellow) with the November 2024 Core Update. As noted earlier, the volatility leading into the November update was actually higher!
This makes it challenging to establish a baseline period of “relative rank stability” for analyzing the increases in rank volatility during the update, for obvious reasons.
To accurately assess the impact of the rollout on rank volatility, we’ll need to look further back in time. As a rule, when pulling this data, we aim to use data points as close as possible to the update.
This enables us to factor in the volatility scenario around the update and to see how impactful the introduction of the core update to that scenario was.
Again, we can’t do that here.
Instead, we went back to a period of “relative rank stability” seen in July 2024.
One of the reasons we went back to this period is that it was a similar timeframe to the baseline data we used to analyze the August 2024 Core Update.
This approach puts us in a better position to compare the two updates, as we’re now working with a similar baseline that allows us to observe the volatility impact more effectively. However, there are some limitations, as the November 2024 Core Update likely occurred within a different “ranking environment” compared to the August update.
With that in mind, let’s examine the increase in rank volatility relative to the August 2024 Core Update by simply looking at the immediate period of rank volatility prior to the update, without adjusting the data:
Across the board, we see that the November 2024 Core Update saw less volatility change when compared to the August 2024 Core Update relative to the baseline period.
Notably, a few verticals were less volatile than the immediate baseline during the August 2024 Core Update (see the Games and Health verticals, for example). However, during the November 2024 Core Update, this was true for all verticals.
If we adjust the baseline to work with a period of relative stability we get a bit of a different data scenario.
Here’s the change in volatility once we recalculated November’s data using a stable period during July 2024:
Overall, the November 2024 Core Update was less impactful than the August 2024 Core Update with even this modified data pull (again going back to a period of volatility “calm” in July 2024).
While verticals like Sports and Law & Government saw noticeable increases in volatility in November relative to the August 2024 Core Update others, such as Internet & Telecom and Business & Industrial, saw less volatility.
Of course, there’s more to it and a more layered approach is needed. To that, the pure level of just peak volatility seen during the November 2024 Core Update were also lower compared to August:
Here too, the numbers were consistent across all verticals. Setting aside the News vertical (which is always highly volatile), not a single vertical showed a peak greater than 8 on the scale during the November 2024 Core Update. By comparison, 13 verticals (excluding News) had peak volatility levels of 8 or higher during the August 2024 Core Update.
Moving beyond levels of volatility per se and into how extreme the rank movement during the November 2024 Core Update was the average position gained/lost stood around 2.4 positions:
That’s slightly less than August 2024 Core Update where the average positions gained/lost stood at around 2.6 positions.
This is a pattern that continues across the board.
When we start looking deeper into the severity of the ranking movement the August 2024 Core Update seems to have been slightly more drastic.
Back in August, 9.5% of the top 10 URLs post update ranked beyond position 20 prior to its roll-out. That number fell marginally to 9% during the November 2024 Core Update.
This pattern only continues when moving to the top results on the SERP. Back in August, 3.3% of the top 5 ranking URLs did not even crack the top 20 proper to the update. This number falls again during the November 2024 Core Update to 2.8%:
It seems, then, that the August 2024 Core Update delivered a slightly larger impact overall compared to the November update. However, this does not mean that individual sites couldn’t have experienced more movement in November than in August—this is aggregate data, reflecting simulated rank movement across the web.
This is an interesting development. In my experience analyzing updates over the years, it’s relatively rare for an update to appear less, rather than more, potent than its predecessor.
The Complexity of November 2024 Core Update
Being able to decipher the overall impact of the November 2024 Core Update is one thing. Being able to separate out the pre-update volatility is another thing entirely. That overlap can make analyzing a site’s rank performance a bit tricky.
But forget that! All but a week after finalizing the November 2024 Core Update, Google released the December 2024 Core Update!
It’s an incredible barrage of volatility. In a way it’s all unprecedented. This is especially true as Google’s Danny Sullivan said to expect more updates as the company no longer sees them as “major events” but as “routine and continuous.”
We are almost certainly entering a new era of volatility and Google updates.
We live in interesting “SEO” times.
