Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search

Dec 3, 2020

December 2020 Core Update

Today we released 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. Please see this blog post for more about that.

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Last edited Dec 3, 2020

Recommended Answer

Dec 3, 2020

UPDATE (10am PT, Dec. 3): The December 2020 Core Update is now rolling out live. As is typical with these updates, it will typically take about one to two weeks to fully roll out.

UPDATE (10:42am PT, Dec. 16): The December 2020 Core Update rollout is complete.

Last edited Dec 16, 2020

Original Poster Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search marked this as an answer

User 11716358730985119540

Dec 6, 2020

I was ranking very well before ... My blog is having good content ... but this update hit my ranking ... and my ranking dropped from top 10 to 14th page.. overnight ... all my hardworking went to vain by overnight ... do google even cares? I don't think so

Jesse N.

Dec 7, 2020

I read through some replies and checked some URLs people posted, especially the ones comparing highly ranked spammy sites with a sites that were outranked. One thing that stuck out to me is that the higher ranking sites, though spammy, have their domains registered much earlier on. So could domain age play a role here?

Zer Gud

Dec 7, 2020

https://bodrus.com/ site of customs clearance and cargo transportation. The changes also affected. Something went down a lot, and something on the contrary up. I still haven't found a pattern.

Google user

Dec 7, 2020

@danny

Sir Need your openion on this too:

Please check https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/87298813?hl=en&msgid=87298813

Umer Daraz Khan

Dec 7, 2020

How long does it take for the update to completely roll out? Is there a chance that if the ranking have dropped can be gained back in a week?

Paolopi

Dec 7, 2020

@ Danny

The only winners are spam websites and large publishers. If you look in the google news (in Germany) and search for football players for example you will find 4 weeks old news that are absolutely not relevant. Serious German sites that previously published news about players and teams have disappeared. The news in Germany consists 99% of old junk from big US publishers and 1% big german Publishers in the most Niches. To check this out just search for a NFL player in the news in Germany. For example Bud Dupree. Here you can only find news from US sites although there are some German media that report seriously and were in the news before. If this remains so then google should rename the tab NEWS to TRASH. The normal serps are worse than ever before, websites with 800 words of pure spam are clearly ahead of sites with 4000 words of clean content that deliver the Users all Answers. What exactly does google want to achieve with such updates? Better search results? Then this update should be reversed very quickly because now the spam has taken over the serps and the google news have become completely useless.

Last edited Dec 8, 2020

Ben Myers

Dec 7, 2020

ive an 18-month old site posting daily original and press release-based content. The only site in the UK bingo niche. All gone from the news tab and replaced with blatant backlink articles and 3 week old content.- yellow are backlink articles - this page one of the news

WSLU

Dec 7, 2020

I'm glad Google is monitoring this and I sincerely hope you legitimate publishers will see a correction made. I feel for your current plight.

Eric Melillo

Dec 8, 2020

Our blog that has amazing and helpful content lost 75% of all its traffic. We’ve been working diligently for over a year and it’s just gut wrenching! It’s really hard as my family depends on this blog. I don’t even have words. I’m really hopeful it bounces back.

Alan123456789

Dec 8, 2020

Dear all, we have seen a huge dip in our search traffic. We are a news site focusing on quality reporting. We had only recently completed a url change and rebuilt our search traffic back up to decent levels. Does the domain age play apart in this?

Carsten HH

Dec 8, 2020

Hi Danny,

we are hit massive by the actual Update on our important Page.

3 Obervations in short Form.

1 We operate 3 Pages in the same topic. The Project we offers about 90% of our time was hit massive.

The Project we did nothing raised a little bit. For the Mainproject we build a search to help users find better offers. We are rated by the german TÜV. Which qualifies worldwide Projects, and also Webprojects.

2 As Ranking Examples: At the Main Keyword we dropped from Page 1 to Page 3. So we ar now behind single Articles, written in an hour, with our Page were we invests 1000s of hours. Also we are behind 2 hours build affiliate-comparison pages on big Newspapers which has nithing to do with their Expertise.

3 On Longtail Keywords on that topic, i see Pages on Position 6,7,8,9, all at the first Page, which are expired domains from f.E. a plumber or other businesses, which has now automatic keyword content which redirects to an offer in that topic. This is thrash SEO from 2005.

So all this three points are issue's which dont shows quality in the serps, and which dont show that idea to build pages for the users.

Great if i would be able to show you this issues.

Carsten

Last edited Dec 8, 2020

Steve Smith 5061

Dec 8, 2020

Yup, there goes all my hard work creating a fresh user friendly and informative site... now replaced with sites with endless google ads and popups... maybe that's the plan, so google makes more money.

Concentrate on quality content they say... but the results show anything but.

40% drop in traffic since the update.

Merry Christmas from Google.