Google Algorithm Update: December 2020 Core Update

 Spent the morning reviewing sites affected by the Dec core update. Seeing changes for many medical sites. Several of our alt med sites saw nice gains. But we saw changes in other YMYL verticals as well (not all positive).

Many sites saw a good /average increase in organic traction after the update, and they thought the good times are back.

But…

The first three days after the update was beneficial and then Google seems to have launched the reversal update.

For more information: what is off-page SEO learning 

Many site owners took to Twitter and forums to express their dismay as their ranking improvements disappeared. In some cases, the rankings fell worse than before.

Here is a tweet from Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive:

An update based on one of the reversals I shared yesterday. Ouch, their visibility gains completely reversed as of today (even lower slightly than before the update rolled out). Again, this niche was heavily impacted. Stay tuned. 

Our suggestion for you is to continue producing good quality content and not make any panic decisions.

The core algorithm updates are intended to revise the search results to give an advantage to high-quality content that failed to show up.

Unfortunately, this process ends up in a few sites losing the rankings. The most common culprit is stale content.

Make sure to add more relevance and context to your content with additional impetus on adding useful information that users are searching for online.

Also, try creating holistic content than fragmented. Bind your content around topics, clubbing them together in Pillar-Cluster format.

This way, Google will sense more topical relevancy on your content, and you have a higher chance of ranking higher.

For more information: black hat seo learning

The rollout of the December 2020 Core Update is not yet officially over. Still, the causalities caused by this new broad core update seems to be massive.

By looking at the tweets, and more importantly, the algorithm trackers, it seems like a lot of sites were hit. But there is always a brighter side to this because many sites that were not ranking high are now on top, which is good.

Based on what we know until now, looking at the forum discussions and the SEO community’s sentiments, the Update was more significant than what we saw last May. Probably, Google Algorithms found a lot of things changed during the time of Pandemic that required major reassessment.

Anyhow, it’s pretty clear that the rollout had a global impact, with almost all industries seeing massive SERP fluctuations.

The tweet announcing the rollout is pretty straight forward as it says the complete rollout will take a week or two, which means the changes that you are seeing now may be temporary, and the results might be different when the rollout is over. So, keep up your spirits and wait till the rollout is complete before making decisive decisions.

This year wasn’t that great anyway; let hope 2021 will open up a lot more opportunities 

Here is how the Algorithm Trackers Detected the Impact of the December 2020 Core Update.

Putting an end to the seven-month wait of SEOs, Google has finally announced that the December 2020 Core Update will be rolled out on December 3rd.

The official Search Liason Twitter handle made the preannouncement about the update. The tweet says, “Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the December 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before.” 

The directives for the webmasters remain the same as Google has previously announced that broad core algorithm updates are meant to reassess the quality of pages currently ranking on Google.

This means that the websites that were not ranking higher on Google despite publishing quality content will get a ranking boost. However, the websites that see a drop in rankings have to deep dive into the reasons that could have triggered it.

According to Google, a drop in rankings after the core update doesn’t mean that the website or its content is bad. The search giant says it could be just that someone has written an updated content or added fresh data, which the users are more interested in reading.

We will do an in-depth analysis of the update in the coming hours and keep you posted with the fluctuations shown within the algorithm trackers.

The current announcement is just an alert. The rollout will start later during the day and is expected to last for a few days, as it has been the case before.

What makes this update more significant is that it comes after a hiatus of more than seven months.

Since late 2018, it has been a pattern for Google to roll out an update every three months, but the last confirmed Broad Core Update was announced back in May 2020, just as most countries around the world were passing through the worst phase of COVID 19.

Unconfirmed Google Algorithm Update – 16-08-2020

A few days after Google faced the heat due to a bug within its Caffeine Algorithm that caused irrelevant results to appear on SERPs, the search engine giant now seems to have launched a major algorithm update.

According to the data retrieved from algorithm trackers, the new update, which remains unconfirmed till now, has created strong turbulence in search results. This also means that many websites may have noticed significant changes in the organic traffic trend.

This kind of very high SERP fluctuation is usually the result of Google making decisive changes to its algorithm as it does a number of time every year. Usually, these unannounced massive fluctuations are precursors to a looming broad core update.