Google Spam Update

The other day, I stumbled across something that caught my attention while digging into a site.

At first glance, everything looked perfectly fine—actually, even too good. The content was clearly human-written, well-structured, and without any of the usual spammy techniques like manipulative link building, doorway pages, or cloaking. No historical corrections, no signs of abuse—just solid work.

But when I checked performance data (via external tools, which I always take with a grain of salt), it seemed the site had most likely been hit by the December 2024 spam update, showing about a 50% drop.

That raised a question: why would a clean-looking site take a hit?

Reasons why a site could have been hit by the December 2024 Spam Update

1. Scaled Content Abuse
   • Large volumes of low-value or AI-generated content.
   • Thin, programmatic, or aggregated content that adds no real user value.
2. Doorway Pages
   • Multiple near-duplicate pages created to target variations of keywords or locations.
   • Pages designed mainly to funnel users to a single destination.
3. Expired Domain Abuse
   • Using a previously authoritative domain for unrelated or spammy content.
   • Common in affiliate-heavy or link-farming setups.
4. Link Spam
   • Manipulative backlink practices: buying/selling links, excessive link exchanges, automated backlink generation, private blog networks (PBNs).
5. Hidden Text or Links
   • Text or links invisible to users but visible to crawlers (CSS tricks, font-size zero, off-screen positioning).
6. Cloaking
   • Showing different content to Googlebot than to normal users.
7. Malicious or Hacked Content
   • Malware, injected ads, or unauthorized content added via security breaches.
8. Keyword Stuffing / Thin Affiliation
   • Overloading pages with keywords.
   • Affiliate content with minimal added value beyond the merchant’s site.
9. Structure data/snippet abuse (manipulative behavior)
   • Fake review markup (e.g. marking up testimonials that aren’t real)
   • Misleading schema types (e.g. using Product or Event schema on non-relevant pages)
   • Overuse of markup to manipulate rich results

I checked all of this – nothing stands out as an obvious reason, but there are still a few facts which, taken separately, should not be a big issue.

The facts that stood out:

• According to SEMrush, the website does not have branded traffic.
• Around 200 blog pages in total, with 129 posts in the sitemap.
• About 100 posts hadn’t been touched since before 2024.
• Content was spread across 17 categories, all indexable.
• Category pages had no descriptive copy, making them thin (about 8% of the site).
• A sudden batch of 15 new posts was added on one day in October 2024.

Individually, none of these factors would raise a red flag. But taken together, they might have triggered some kind of suspicion in the algorithm. It’s the combination, not the pieces alone, that seemed interesting here.

And now, during the current spam update rollout, it looks like the site has slipped again. I’m not offering advice here – you should know what to do – just sharing an observation. To me, this case highlights how small, seemingly harmless factors can add up and potentially tip the balance in Google’s systems.

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