Statistics from Google's main December update

Five search marketers have given their thoughts on Google's main December 2020 update. The observations provide interesting feedback on what may have happened.

In my opinion, Google updates are less and less about ranking factors and more on improving the way queries and web pages are understood.

Some believe that Google will randomly search the search results in order to deceive those who try to reverse engineer the Google algorithm.

I do not share this opinion.

Some features of the algorithm are difficult to detect in search results. It is not facile to point to a search result and say it is ranked because of the BERT algorithm or Neural Matching.

But it's easy to point to backs, EAT or user experience as reasons for why a site ranks or does not rank not if this is what stands out, although the real reason might be more related to BERT.

So the search engine results pages ( SERPs ) may seem confusing and haphazard to those looking at SERPs for traditional old-school ranking factors as to why pages are ranking or why they have lost theirr classification during an update.

Of course, Google's updates can seem unfathomable. The reasons why the ranking of web pages has changed drastically over the past few years is due to technologies such as natural language processing.

What if Google updates and no one sees what has changed?

It 's happened in the past that Google changed something ng and the SEO community didn ' t notice it.

For example, when Google added an algorithm like BERT, many could not detect what had changed.

Now what if Google adds something like the SMITH algorithm? How could the SEO community detect this?

SMITH is described in a Document Google search published in April 2020 and revised in October 2020. SMITHmakes it easier to understand a long page of content, surpassing BERT.

Here is what it says:

I'm not saying that Google introduced the SMITH algorithm ( PDF ) or that it is linked to Passage Algorithm .

What I'm highlighting is that the December 2020 Core update contains the seemingly unobservable quality of c

If Google added a new feature based on the 'AI or was updating an existing feature like BERT, would the search marketing community be able to spot it? Probably not.

And it is this quality of unobservable changes that may indicate that what has changed may have something to do with how Google understands them.queries and web pages.

If this is the case, it may mean that instead of turning the wheels on the usual ranking factors which are easily observable (links from scraper sites, site speed, etc.), it may help to take a step back and consider something deeper than the usual ranking factors that have changed.

Google's December 2020 Core Update Preview

Thank you to those who had the time to give their feedback, they provided some great information that could help you put the update to the base algorithm in perspective from Google in December.

Dave Davies ( @ oohloo )
Bea nstalk Internet Marketing

Dave puts this update in the context of what Google told the algorithm soon and how this might play a role in the fluctuations.

Dave proposed:

Steven Kang ( @ SEOSignalsLab )

Steven Kang, founder of the popular SEO Signals Lab Facebook group notes that nothing seems to stand out in terms of points common or symptoms between winners and losers.

Daniel K Cheung ( @ danielkcheung )
Team Leader, Prosperity Media

Daniel thinks it's useful to take a step back and check out Google updates from the big picture of the image of the forest rather than the tree structure of the last update, and to put those updates in the context of what we know is happening in search.

An example is the kissis related to manual activity reports in Google Search Console . Does this mean that Google is better at ranking the sites they belong to, without having to resort to punitive manual actions?

This is how Daniel sees the latest update to Google's core algorithm:

Cristoph Cemper ( @ cemper )
LinkResearchTools, CEO

Cristoph Cemper considers the latest update to impact a wide range of factors.

Here is what he shared:

Michael Martinez ( @ seo_theory )
Founder of SEOTheory

Michael Martinez offered these insightss:

What Happened in Goo gle Main Update December 2020?

Perspectives on what happened when Google's core algorithm updated varies. What most observers seem to agree is that no obvious factors or changes seem to emerge.

And this is an interesting observation because it could mean something related to AI or Natural language processing has been refined or introduced. But that's just speculation until Google explicitly excludes it.