Seven months after the previous announcement, Google confirms that it has made a major update to its algorithm that allows it to rank search results in its engine.
Google confirmed on Twitter the implementation of a major update to its algorithm on December 3 at the end of the day. Its name: Core Update of December 2020. This is a usual process on the part of Google, which releases updates of the type “Core Update” throughout the year.
Updates like this allow you to keep up to date the way in which its algorithms classify pages within the search engine. These updates generally affect all search results for all countries and languages.
A 7-month period between Google’s 2 major updates:
No information is filtered on the content of this update nor on the pages that it should have impacted, we know that the Core Update of December 2020, like the previous ones, modifies Google’s algorithms, i.e. the way in which the search engine positions the pages in its index.
This is the third major update made by Google to its algorithm in 2020, following the Core Update of January 2020 and the Core Update of May 2020, which was launched on May 4, just 7 months ago. We can see that this time frame is longer than the previous intervals between two updates of the Google algorithm.
It is possible that this year the Covid-19 pandemic has delayed the calendar of updates provided by the search engine.
Does this mean that this update will have a greater impact than the previous two? It is difficult for the moment to provide a concrete answer to this question. The implementation of a major update from Google, such as the “Core Update” type, takes one to two weeks. Its likely effects will only be observed in the next few days.
Central update of December 2020: priority actions to be taken
The SEO community, web professionals as well as site owners or administrators will need to pay attention to anticipate possible future variations in their traffic. Updates of this type can generate positive and negative surprises. Faced with the announcement of a Google algorithm update, two actions should be taken as a priority.
Analyze your traffic, the pages concerned, the positioning of your keywords
First, we recommend that you check if you are seeing increases or decreases in organic traffic on your site by comparing it with the previous period or with last year, by doing these searches in your Google Analytics account or directly in the Search Console.
Therefore, we recommend that you analyze the positioning of your keywords to find out if the algorithm update has affected their performance. SEO tracking tools can help you decipher the different indicators and thus allow you to better tailor your actions based on the potential effects generated by this December 2020 Core Update.
Don’t Panic:
If this inspection leads you to believe that your site may have been affected by the Google algorithm update, there is no reason to panic. In this case, we recommend that you continue to analyze the various pages of your site, which have been affected by the “Core Update”.
Also focus your research on the questions in question. Other things to watch out for are your zero positions, whether you’ve gained or lost any as a result of this December update.
Whatever the result of your traffic analysis, you should never hastily change your pages already ranked by Google. This action could have more serious consequences for your organic traffic. For example, you can start planning changes to be made in the long term, these will have a greater impact and will help you find lost positions more easily, anticipating the next Google “Core Update”.
