Just a couple of weeks ago in this article we explained that John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google announced that the perverse big algorithm update that we all expected by the end of summer would be postponed and that it was something that we were not going to see this year . And it is that Google loves to be sick and tease us. Just yesterday in a tweet he announced that he had already launched, after seven months of calm, the third major update of the algorithm this year. Historically, one of the longest.
December 2020 Core Update
Through its official Twitter account, Google announced the launch of the December 2020 Core Update:
In their brief message, they limit themselves to announcing the name of the update that they will launch later and refer to the usual reference document of August 2019, quite general, to know how to act before this update. In fact. The rollout of this update officially began yesterday afternoon on North American Eastern Time. And according to Mountain View, “the December 2020 Core Update has begun to be implemented. As is customary with these types of updates, it will typically take one to two weeks to fully deploy globally. ”
In fact, this announcement makes it clear that, perhaps, the alleged algorithm update that we announced yesterday was nothing more than the previous steps of this December 2020 Core Update. You just have to take a look at tools like Cognitive SEO:
The latest major update to Google’s algorithm
As we told you, this time Google has taken its time to launch its latest update. They are usually done every three to four months. But the last one was the May 2020 Core Update in early May. It was a fairly extensive update that took a couple of weeks to fully implement with a major impact. Apparently their focus was the quality and reliability of the content.
As for the previous one, the January 2020 Core Update from the beginning of January, focused on adjusting the algorithm’s trust in domains and its adjustment in SERP.
What can we expect from the December 2020 Core Update
As we have already mentioned on other occasions, despite the announcement, Google is usually quite vague in the content of its updates. They just link to the usual reference document that reminds us of the basic content standards. In fact, there is little we can do if an update like the December 2020 Core Update hits our website to regain positioning.
Based on the information, we can assume that the changes it entails will presumably focus on improving the way your system evaluates content in general. So the only thing we can do is make sure that our content meets the Google guidelines. To do this, we can review our pages by answering the following questions:
Content and quality questions
- Does the content provide meaningful analysis, original information, or research?
- Does our content offer a substantial, complete description of the topic?
- Does the content display insightful analysis or relevant information, beyond the obvious?
- If our content is based on other sources, do you avoid simply copying or rewriting these sources, and instead offer additional and original value?
- Does the content or page title provide a descriptive and useful summary of the content?
- Does your title avoid being exaggerated or shocking?
- Is this the type of page we would like to tag, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Would we expect to see this content in a print magazine, encyclopedia, or book?
Reliability questions
- Does the content present information in a way that we would trust it? Pay attention to putting clear reference sources, background on the author or the website that has published it.
- Is the content written by an expert who knows the subject?
- Is our content free of spelling or style problems?
- Is the content mass-produced, or is it outsourced to a large number of creators, or is it distributed across a large network of sites so that other individual sites may not get as much attention?
- Does our content have a large number of ads that distract or interfere with the main content?
- Does the content display correctly on mobile devices?
It is still too early to determine the effects and impact of this major update on our accounts. So over the next few days we will monitor the metrics to check the effects and we will continue to inform you.