Google December 2024 Core Update Wiped Out 99% of My Website Traffic
Traffic is down about 99% since Google’s December 2024 Core Update.
I started a TravelWithKinsley.com in August 2024. I finally decided to niche down and focus on my travel content. My first posts went live on August 11.
I wasn’t affected by the August 2024 Core Update because my website was brand new. I only had about 10 posts.
I was slowly growing my website and seeing organic growth.
In December 2024, we took a trip to Hawaii. Then the holidays were upon us. I took a break from updating/posting.
Heck, I didn’t even login during those couple weeks.
Around mid-January, I got my act together and made a plan to begin posting again. This is when I finally realized that my website wasn’t receiving any traffic.
I have gone from 7k impressions per day to about 20, maybe.
Google released the December 2024 Core Update on December 12 and December 2024 Spam Update on December 19.
I have no Manual Actions or Security Issues in Search Console. But my website isn’t being shown in Google serps…
When I do a site:(my website) all pages are indexed still.
I checked the Pagespeed Insights, but besides a couple too-large images everything else seems to be okay enough.
Bing search results are still growing.
On February 4, 2025 I tried to disavow links to my website. I will update at a later date to see if this improved traffic.
I also deleted Grow.me by Mediavine because maybe it looks spammy.
Future PLANS
1. Rewrite all content using the EEAT and SPEAR framework.
Update: March 24, 2025
I found a critical issue over the weekend on a different website where I had started writing my travel content (before I decided to start a new domain).
Since I’ve only been writing on travelwithkinsley.com for the past six months, I never even thought about the other domain.
Before I decided to move away from Ionos hosting for being a slow website, I had tried out various caching plugins to help speed up my pagespeed insights.
Even though I didn’t end up keeping the KeyCDN plugin, apparently it created a cached version of my website in August 2024.
And for whatever reason, the domain has been loading the cached version (probably since December?). I’m not sure how to check the files for that.
Since I was logged into that WordPress instance, I was seeing the live content. But I opened an incognito browser and it didn’t so any recent posts.
It did, however, load the old content that I had previously redirected to the new url.
It was showing content was still live and non of my 301 redirects were working.
Oof, headache.
Cached Site Still Receiving Traffic
I checked in my GA account and one post has been getting traffic the entire time. The redirect was created on September 5, 2024.
It’s not as much traffic as it had the prior year, but it was still being shown in the Google serps because it was cached.
This would mean that my website was penalized because it was duplicate content (because I moved the travel content I already created on the old domain and 301 redirected it to the content on the new domain).
Update: April 1, 2025
Google finished rolling out the March Core update on March 27, 2025.
The rollout began on March 13. You can see in the graph above that I started getting clicks again during the rollout.
Update April 7, 2025
I check my search traffic today and there was a large uptick in traffic on April 4 (over 1K search impressions).
I’m going to monitor it to see if stays on the upward trend.
Incognito Search
I even did an incognito search and the website is finally appearing in the serps.
