RE: the December Core Update

It wasn't as destructive as I thought

Author

Ian H
December 19, 2024

I’ve been hearing rumors that the December Core update caused devastating traffic losses to HCU-hit sites.

But how bad was it?

I looked at the data to find out.

I analyzed 85,335 websites, all monetized with Mediavine, Raptive, or Amazon Associates.

Turns out, the December Core update was actually very quiet.

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On average across all 85,335 sites, traffic increased by 1%.

However, the majority of sites (54%) had traffic losses.

The biggest winners were sites with over 1,000,000 monthly visitors, as usual.

As with previous updates, smaller sites were the most negatively affected. The biggest “losers” were sites with less than 10,000 monthly visitors.

Thankfully, the average traffic loss for sites under 10K monthly visitors was just 5%. So it wasn’t the bloodbath initial reports made it out to be.

There are certainly some outlier cases where sites lost over 50% of their traffic (or gained 1,000%+).

From my data, one of the worst hit sites was SimplisticallyLiving .com (which had a 73% traffic decrease):

If you look at the raw data, you’ll see a bunch of sites with much greater traffic losses, but most of those were not due to the update.

Take overclocking .com for example:

I gathered traffic data on the 12th, which happens to be the only day this site had an abnormal traffic spike. The next day, it fell back to previous levels. This obviously can’t be considered a traffic loss due to the December Core update, because it didn’t even have that traffic before the update.

Another example:

This site was hit by the November Core update, so even though it lost another 96% during the December Core update, it was the November update that caused the drop.

Most of the major “losers” are cases like the ones above.

And, most of the biggest winners are not winning because of the update either. They simply had traffic spikes (which most likely would’ve occurred regardless of the December Core update).

For more info/data related to the update, read my brand-new article:

As usual, I’m sharing the raw data as well, so you can do your own analysis. You can get it here.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Ian

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