The year is almost over, but SEO is anything but restful. In this roundup, you’ll learn about major announcements, big changes, and how some of the community’s top minds prepare for the next year.
In the top stories for the month, you’ll learn about the changes to Google’s site reputation abuse policy, the latest about the November 2024 Core Update, and why one SEO is predicting the possibility of Google’s End.
After that, there are other headlines you shouldn’t miss. You’ll learn about ChatGPT prompts that break Google, search trends worth following, new alternative strategies for keywords, how bots will change the web, and what to expect from new Google Search Console recommendations.
Updating Our Site Reputation Abuse Policy
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/11/site-reputation-abuse
Google has dropped a new statement on their ‘site reputation abuse’ policy. This policy targets what Search Central describes as “the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.”
Now, they’ve declared a large change in the policy. As they put it in the statement:
Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host’s site’s ranking signals.
The statement clarifies that there will be no exceptions for cooperation with white-label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements.
As part of this policy change, Google is implementing systems and methods designed to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. These areas will now be treated as independent sites.
Near the end of the statement, Google recommends that readers check out the complete spam policies page to learn more about what 3rd party content is considered violating and non-violating.
Check out the FAQs provided at the end of the statement if you want their advice on recognizing spam, moving content to a new location, and how to redirect appropriately. For now, you’re ready to move on to what happened in the final days of the November Update.
Google November 2024 Core Update Rollout Is Now Complete
https://searchengineland.com/google-november-2024-core-update-rollout-is-now-complete-448428
Barry Schwartz brings you this news about the end of the 2024 core update. The end was announced on December 5th after weeks of search signal disruption.
The update was still going strong in the final weeks of November. Barry tracked the movement through a series of tools. All of them showed a significant amount of disruption and collected some SEO chatter.
The reaction of SEOs to the late-November movement did not seem overjoyed. On WebMasterWorld, multiple SEOs and site owners reported massive drops. The drops were reflected across the map, including in the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia.
Overall, Barry feels that this was not a large update compared to several that have already come and gone. Google had very little advice that was summarized in Google’s documentation of the update as: “There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people.”
It may take some time to know how all the changes will begin to impact SEO. According to at least one SEO, though, time is something Google is running out of.
The Beginning of Google’s End?
The Beginning of Google’s End?
Mark Webster of Authority Hacker is predicting Google’s end. Comparing it to other dying properties like Facebook, he insists there are signs behind the scenes that point to it losing the power it once had.
He starts by looking at how Google came up. As he points out, Google has maintained near-monopoly control of search for almost 20 years. Mark gives most of the credit to the value of PageRank, and how it allowed Google to deliver results that were simply stronger than the rest of the competition.
This dominance eventually baked in to the point that “Google” became a universal verb for looking something up online.
Mark believes that the story of this all coming down first started when Google began an arms race with SEOs. The steps they took simply to cut down on algorithm manipulation resulted in serious problems for users. For example, like recipe sites that insist on prefacing every recipe with a life story.
SEOs can’t take all the blame, though. Google’s search advertising team is also a big target of Google’s critics. Over the years, Google has given ads more space, made them harder to discern from real results, and have constantly introduced features that competed with their top quality results.
The effects of these and other problems have regular people abandoning Google, claims Mark. They are searching on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and ChatGPT instead.
Mark claims that Google is still enjoying some of the benefits of these searches, because users are going to Google after their search is refined. Mark thinks that Google is about to lose even this traffic, though as generative search becomes more able to deliver information and products directly.
Check out the full video for more of Mark’s analysis. For now, you may be interested to know that there is a ChatGPT prompt that can do some interesting things to Google.
This ChatGPT Prompt BREAKS Google
This ChatGPT Prompt BREAKS Google
I was able to fundamentally change how Google responds to my content by changing my AI prompts . In this video, I cover how I made these prompts and how you can use them to create more content that excites Google.
The trick is quite simple: I make the AI write in a NLP-friendly format. If you need a quick refresher, NLP stands for “Natural Language Processing.” It’s a subfield of computer science that focuses on machine learning developments that allow computers to understand human language and communicate with it in an effective way.
So, now you know what NLP means, but what about NLP-friendly content? I provide you with a lot of examples in my video, but to tease some of them, you need to directly answer the question covered in your topic, and you need to have clear sentence ordering.
To find out the value of NLP content, I performed a split test on my own sites with content that was NLP friendly, and content that wasn’t. Across multiple tests, NLP-friendly content went up, and the non-friendly content went down.
I show you how to write these prompts in detail in the video. Detail is necessary, because there are a lot of parts of the prompt you’ll need to include to get the results I saw in testing. You’ll need to request a specific sentence order, vocabulary, and precision.
See the video for some example prompts you can use to get started now on your own tests or high-performing NLP Content. Next, you’ll learn why one SEO thinks a big bot wave is coming and how it may change the web forever.
BotNet: How The Rapid Growth Of Bots Could Change The Open Web
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/rapid-growth-of-bots-could-change-the-open-web/532975/
Kevin Indig brings you this look at how bots are evolving and how you may soon be forced to deal with them in new ways. He starts by telling you something that will probably surprise you: more than half of all online traffic comes just from bots.
To put it in perspective, Kevin provides you with some surprising data:
Imperva’s Bad Bot Report 2024 reveals that almost 50% of total internet traffic wasn’t human in 2024. Trend: declining- Cloudflare’s Radar shows ~70% human traffic and 30% from bots
- Akami reports that 42% of traffic on the web comes from bots
However, it isn’t even the old bots Kevin is warning you about; it’s a new kind he refers to as “agentic” bots. While website owners have been forced to optimize their sites for Google bots, they may now have to do it to help AI helper bots that serve as agents to humans.
As Kevin shows, AI crawl requests have already increased by almost 20% in the last six months. These and other statistics are important to consider because bot activity is not just benign. Some bots are malicious and designed to probe for weaknesses.
All AI developers are currently working on agents that can browse the web and take actions for users that include moving cursors, clicking buttons, and typing text in the correct fields.
Kevin has a lot of theories for how this may play out in the near future. He predicts that agent traffic will increase significantly, that agents are using APIs to gather information, and that agents may operate on their own platform.
Check out his complete guide to learn more. For now, you can get SEO forecasts on many other areas from many more SEOs.
2025 SEO Trends: Top Predictions from 23 Industry Experts
https://moz.com/blog/2025-seo-trends-top-predictions-from-23-industry-experts
Chima Mmeje brings you 23 perspectives on what’s likely to change for SEO in the coming year. They cover some creative territory. LLMs and AI were a major focus of the respondents, and they made the following kinds of predictions about what you’ll need to do next year.
They think:
The use of AI will drive long, conversational keyword queries- Snippets may go away entirely in favor of AI overviews
- You’ll be able to use AI for more of the SEO workflow than ever before
- You’ll need to adapt to zero-click environments
- You’ll need to track referral traffic from LLMs
- You’ll to optimize for AI to access your site easily
- You’ll need to build trust signals that encourage AI retrieval and use
- You’ll need to do community building to ensure good channels for content distribution
- You’ll need to branch out from Google to other platforms
Check out the full article to see the complete statement from each SEO, and find out about the many other topics they discussed. You’ll be surprised how some topics just keep coming up. There’s one last piece of news you should know before you go.
Google Search Console Recommendations Now Fully Live
https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-recommendations-now-fully-live-448631
Google has announced that they have fully rolled out their recommendations. This feature was already available on an experimental basis, but it should now appear in all GSC accounts, and provide you with some insight on what Google thinks may be wrong with your site.
Google provided a preview of the new system in a LinkedIn post and how it should appear in your console. The image includes some sample warnings that you may run into, such as warnings about items that aren’t eligible for rich results, videos that lack thumbnails, and queries that are seeing increased impressions.
You can learn more about the system in the original post Google made with the experimental release.
That’s all the SEO news fit to print for now. I’ll see you next year in the next roundup!
