SEO News: Google’s December Core Update

Almost every day, Google updates its algorithms and systems aiming to improve the user experience with better-informed search results; these are small upgrades and are not noticeable for businesses. But Google also releases significant core updates which impact webmasters, content producers and practically everyone that uses the internet. 

Core updates are global, usually rolled out quarterly, and are not specific to any region, language or category of the web, typically the full scale of the algorithm will take two weeks to develop roots across the net.

The Latest Google Core Update

On December 3rd Google rolled out its final update for 2020, even as the third algorithm released this year it was more significant than all previous 2020 updates combined. Instead of the consistent schedule where upgrades are rolled out every three months, the December update took seven months to develop and therefore had a more considerable impact on search rankings. 

As with each core update, there are many impacts to the SEO, analytics and rankings of sites. Gaining or losing visibility after an update is impossible to identify because the updates do not target site pages, and there are no specific actions to implement which would recover losses.

“Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better” Google states in their press statement for 2019.

A helpful way to think about Google’s core updates can be understood through Google’s analogy “imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2015. A few years later in 2019, you refresh the list. It’s going to change naturally. Some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will now be candidates for inclusion. You might also reassess some films and realise they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before.”

This update has already proven to be broad and hard to predict as professionals on online SEO forums, and social media platforms have claimed losses of 40% in Google organic traffic and in contrast some businesses have claimed increases of 150% in Google traffic.

As the updated was timed just before the Christmas period, it could have catastrophic impacts on small businesses who rely on the income from big holiday orders.