SEO Roundup 2024 — A Year in Review!
We’re back with SEO Roundup 2024 to reflect on everything that happened in the past 12 months. Algorithm changes that impacted the SERPs, new policies that altered strategies, fortunate HCU-hit sites experiencing recoveries, and unpredictable API leaks that ended up opening a Pandora’s box.
Together, SEOs, Creators, and Site Owners experienced drama, development, and disaster. Big appreciation for everyone who stayed sane in some of the most insane times.
In this blog, we have pulled an archive of news, information, and everything important related to SEO developments last year. The good, the bad, and the ugly! Let’s have a look at it one last time;, it’s SEO Roundup in review, here we go!
SEO Content Marketing Roundup
Starting off with the SEO content marketing roundup, we found this Statista report that estimated global content marketing industry revenue to be 63 billion in 2022.
The source projected that by the end of 2024, this revenue would be around 82.3 billion, which is a whopping increment since 2022.
Furthermore, it also states this estimated content marketing revenue will be around 107.5 billion by the year 2026.
Although we couldn’t find the dataset to validate the total revenue of 2024, the uprising trend makes sense as every day, we only see ceaseless new content entries on the internet that may be conducive to achieving the revenue goals one way or another.
API Leaks
The main event of SEO Roundup 2024 that changed the SEO lore forever was none other than API Leaks. Dropped on May 27th and revealed over 14000 attributes and 2500 modules. There were labels, features, and full-fledged systems that Google denied their existence all this time. Some of them were infamous site authority, source type anchors, localized backlinks, and more eye-opening, mind-boggling mentions.
We came across deep dives and detailed discourse cracking the collection of information everyone had something to say, it was ‘Aha, I told you moment’ for some.
However, there was a radio silence from Google Liasion for two days. In response to heated chatter, all we saw was the collective ostrich approach and this statement from Davis Thompson on The Verge.
The API leak incident was nothing short of a piano falling out of the sky. To learn more about it, check out the video that we made about the whole thing!
All Google Updates and Their Impact
Let’s have a look at Google algorithm updates 2024. Last year, we had 7 Google Updates in total, 4 Core, and 3 Spam. But every single update changed the Search in its own way and introduced novel elements to SEO best practices 2024. Here’s the upclose breakdown of individual updates.
March Updates (Core, Spam, New Spam Policies)
March came with the first set of updates of the year and they were heavy. We got a core update which is one of the longest-running documented Google updates that took 45 days to complete. A spam update that lasted two weeks. Along with that HCU classifier was integrated into core algorithm systems, and their extension to spam policies was also introduced.
Noticing the growing blackhat practices, Google introduced Expired Domain Abuse, Scaled Content Abuse, and Site Reputation Abuse. Two of them immediately started triggering automated and manual actions, while Site Reputation Abuse was announced to be imposed on May 5th, but that didn’t happen for some reason.
In case you want to know more about it, check out our video where we performed a comprehensive analysis of the complex March Update.
June Spam Update
Fast forward to June, we got a Spam Update that lasted a week, depicted a range of volatility, and targeted spam policy-violating sites.
August Core Update
Then in August, we got the second core update of the year, which took 19 days to complete. And for the first time since September 2023, we got to hear HCU hit sites experiencing different levels of recoveries. According to some notable SEOs, the number kept increasing and in some cases, 80% recovery was also observed.
Now this was noteworthy and made people hopeful once again that their tanked sites might get to pre-September traffic levels in days to come, but that didn’t happen… even we saw some of these sites losing growth with the next updates in line, which of course the continuation of sad cycle once again.
To have a closer look at the recoveries, check out our video where we discussed this important development along with expert insights on the whole thing.
November Core Update
In November, the Search behemoth not only launched the core update but also took big initiatives to ensure a level playing field by crushing Parasite SEO with manual penalties.
Yep, it was the enforcement of the site’s reputation abuse policy that was announced back in March. While search algorithms were going through a timed overhaul, Google was cracking down on some of the big names in the industry that leveraged Parasite SEO for years. Forbes Advisor disappeared off the face of the internet, and other big players, such as CNN Underscore and WSJ Buyside ended up losing their ranking power.
This downfall of parasite SEO marked the end of some of the biggest domains, partnerships, and of course, consistent revenue. As a domino effect, it greatly affected the backlink building techniques in 2024. People were skeptical about putting up affiliate and third-party content on their sites as many sites were reporting unpleasant consequences to it. In case you want to identify if your sites are at risk or not, here’s a very helpful article by Dr. Peter J. Meyers.
December Updates (Core + Spam)
In December, we got two updates back to back. With Core Update launching first, we noticed more sites experiencing traffic loss as compared to the traffic gains. In addition, many HCU site recoveries experienced a massive drop with the last core update of the year, some were back to square 1 which was quite devastating.
Then only a day after Google dropped a Spam Update not letting SEOs catch a wink of sleep/not letting SEOs breathe. The last update burned through Christmas and affected many big and small ecommerce sites this holiday season.
Google SEO changes 2024 were detailed, dramatic, and complex but surely a step forward in the right direction, which was to make search better.
Shameless plug – if you want to know more about these updates, check out our YouTube channel, where we publish videos for every update. These videos contain hot takes and comprehensive analyses we did during and after the rollout of every update.
AI Uprising
Mentioning the advent of AI in our SEO Roundup is imperative, especially since it thrived by leaps and bounds. From new tools to incredible search engines, there were new spaces popping up frequently.
We got to see Google’s AI Overviews, SearchGPT by OpenAI, and Microsoft CoPilot gaining prominence across the world. When it comes to AI video generators, Sora and Google’s Veo 2 made some major breakthroughs.
Google’s Veo 2: this new video generator has been noted for outperforming Sora in early tests. Trained on extensive visual datasets, Veo 2 produces accurate and impressive results, which is not yet achieved by many similar models.
Sora: OpenAI introduced Sora, which gained plenty of hype in different spaces. It’s a text-to-video model, marking a major advancement in AI’s ability to generate high-quality video content from text descriptions.
Google’s Gemini: Another breakthrough was the launch of Google’s Gemini which became the hot topic for tech geeks. An advanced AI model that was seamlessly integrated across Google services and products. The cutting-edge model offers a range of enhanced capabilities including improved coding assistance, better language understanding, and more.
DALL-E 3: OpenAI launched DALL-E 3, the next-generation AI image generator, further improving the quality and realism of AI-generated images. Some of the results were truly mind-blowing.
Whisper: OpenAI also announced the general availability of Whisper, an advanced speech recognition model with applications in various realms.
DeepSeek: Now everyone’s shifting focus to DeepSeek, which is a new player in the AI field. Launched in January 2025 by the Chinese startup DeepSeek, this R1 model is an advanced AI tool that has quickly gained popularity as it utilizes less data and operates at a lower cost compared to its existing competitors.
2025 is expected to bring more incredible innovation in AI development, and we’re excited to see that.
Moving on, let’s have a look at the timeline of important documents updated in 2024.
Timeline of Documents Updated
This section highlights all the prominent Search Engine Updates 2024 that every dedicated SEO paid attention to and incorporated into their strategies.
On January 5th, Google updated a document that clarified a primary source of snippets. The document implied that Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet. But in some cases, it may also use meta description elements when it describes the page better than other parts of the content.
On January 25th, we got an update on Google Bot Documentation, and now it has clearer instructions regarding different aspects, for instance,
- how to block Google bot from visiting your site.
- What to do when you don’t want Google to index a page
- Prevent a page from being accessible at all by both crawlers or users
On April 26th, Google released major improvements to the traffic drops documentation. The new addition explained the effects of algorithmic updates and how to identify them and further simplified the sections related to spam policies and manual actions.
On May 14th, Big G introduced AI Overviews in the documentation, which explained how it displays links, how you can opt out of these AI-driven summaries, and how to troubleshoot preview controls.
On May 23rd, Google announced that it now supports epub file format and added it to indexable file types
On July 10th, Google announced that it’s expanding translated results to more languages, including Arabic, Gujarati, Korean, Persian, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
On August 23rd, we got the improved Video SEO documentation which clarified the video indexing criteria, technical requirements, and explained a new watch page section that can make it easier for Google to find your videos on the website.
On September 25th, we got some major clarifications regarding Spam policy. First, Google changed wordings in spam policies for web search to focus more on what web spam is and the tactics involved. In addition to that, it integrated an explanation of close involvement in a blog post that announced site reputation abuse policy back in March.
In the same context, on November 19th, Google made some big moves regarding first-party involvement in hosting third-party content. The updated document explained that hosting third-party content in order to manipulate search rankings through the host’s already-established ranking signals is a violation of policy regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.
These developments in the series felt like a foreshadowing of some major upcoming event regarding sites that were involved in hosting irrelevant third-party content…maybe it was a hint of possible manual penalties against them. So does that mean Google was dropping hints and giving site owners enough time to prepare for that? It does make sense though.
If you want to check out all the documents updated by Google last year, just check out Search Central’s official page as it keeps a detailed record of it.
Google Meetup with Creators
Finally, this year’s SEO Roundup will be incomplete without shedding light on one of the important events that occurred near the end of the year.
On 29th October, Google held a Web Creator Summit where official representatives met HCU hit site owners, listened to their concerns, and answered their questions.
United by the shared experience of seeing their sites tanking wrongfully by the rampant algorithm strikes, these site owners were in attendance to find answers and solutions and ask, ‘What’s next for them?’
According to Mike Hardaker’s account, ‘there were a lot of emotions, heartfelt stories, people cried, people laughed, people cringed, and people called out Google on just about everything. Nobody on the creator’s side held back.”
Google representatives were very straightforward in telling everyone that there’s nothing wrong with their sites or content, it’s just that core systems couldn’t detect that, and these sites got caught up in this algorithm update. We can tell it must’ve been deeply upsetting to hear that you became the victim of some system update without doing anything wrong.
Creators were also told that it’s impossible to achieve pre-September traffic levels now because search results systems have evolved since then. Also, not to be so much hopeful about recovering anytime soon. If the feedback from this event is taken into consideration, it’ll still take multiple updates in line to incorporate that and bring recoveries to the affected sites.
Almost everyone who attended the event appreciated Danny Sullivan and his warm responses, and this meaningful initiative to connect closely with the creators having a hard time. He didn’t shy away from addressing the elephant in the room and provided mindful answers without an ounce of sugarcoating.
All of these gestures mean the guy truly cares about the creators’ community and doing everything he can to help people out.
Helpful Content System has evolved since its launch back in 2022. With the March Update this year, it was made an integral part of the core algorithms, and now these algorithms use a variety of signals and systems to present helpful results to users.
In light of the discourse that occurred at the Creators Summit, it may take some time to recover, but it can happen one day, but nobody’s sure about the timeline. As Marie Haynes said in one of her articles:
“It may be that you’ve got good content, but Google’s systems have not evolved enough yet to correctly determine that.”
That’s a wrap of SEO Roundup 2024!! We’re thankful to all the amazing people in the SEO community who expanded our knowledge, helped us understand complex concepts, and kept us informed throughout the year. Props to you all for doing incredible work and sharing with everyone, our SEO Roundup wouldn’t have been possible without your help !
2024 gave us challenges and chances, lessons and learnings, and a roadmap to do better this year…Hope SEO doesn’t turn out to be an uphill battle for you all! Good luck for 2025!
