Google Broad Core Update December 2020

Google banning (investigating google adsense accounts) the whole December and shuffling around websites without any sense. I don't think this is a coincidence
 
11 days in and no SEO specialist can put a thumb on what is really happening here!!! Smh.. Google!!
 
Ok so from what I understand and I can only check my niche as thats all I care about. There are two major winners...

1. Big brand
2. Mid Brand (in same bracket as me)

Have seen big gains and in some cases competitor 2 has knocked me from the top spot and I now rank pos.2 rather than pos.1..

From what I can tell Big brand has had a make over and restructured content and brand 2 has reformatted all of it's content. Looking at other sites and competitors as well it seems those who have had gains seem to have tweaked the UI or have been reformatting the content.

Our site due to the mass in demand this year has been rather static we could publish a page and rank almost instantly - we tried this with a few products this year and it worked well now the content is all unique and isn't spun, but since the update we have dropped.

From what I can gather we have been effected on two fronts:

1. Pages with the old content layout have dropped a fair bit
2. New pages with a revised product layout (in terms of optimising the page for snippets) have done well BUT no where near the positions they used to be.

My thoughts from my own niche at the moment is sites that have reformatted and improved content have done well, sites that may have remained stagnant have not. Don't get me wrong our blog is active and so is our social media but the main site pages have not improved at all for the very reason they may not have required changes.

It's just a guess but this seems to be a "fresh & care" update in my opinion, and it's only limited to the 50-80 sites I watch in our niche (Home & Garden)

I think those that seem to have come out with new content ideas and improved the page have done well and those who have stuck with just posting anything or nothing at all have dropped. Which I guess is "fair"

What I will say is a competitor who has a private PBN (that I am aware of) with spun and rehashed content or had it outsourced have dropped hard - but this could also be down the their PBN or anything else being discovered I guess..

A few coffee sites I visit with mass authors 50+ seem to have dropped as well but I don't know if that's related to mass content or they are spinning content or something totally different I've not had a deep dive into it all outside of our niche as I have said to confirm this or not.


Again I've only taken a small sample pool of data I have had I'm no SEO Guru by any shot of the imagination, but to me this update seems to be based around content / information.
 
Ok so from what I understand and I can only check my niche as thats all I care about. There are two major winners...

1. Big brand
2. Mid Brand (in same bracket as me)

Have seen big gains and in some cases competitor 2 has knocked me from the top spot and I now rank pos.2 rather than pos.1..

From what I can tell Big brand has had a make over and restructured content and brand 2 has reformatted all of it's content. Looking at other sites and competitors as well it seems those who have had gains seem to have tweaked the UI or have been reformatting the content.

Our site due to the mass in demand this year has been rather static we could publish a page and rank almost instantly - we tried this with a few products this year and it worked well now the content is all unique and isn't spun, but since the update we have dropped.

From what I can gather we have been effected on two fronts:

1. Pages with the old content layout have dropped a fair bit
2. New pages with a revised product layout (in terms of optimising the page for snippets) have done well BUT no where near the positions they used to be.

My thoughts from my own niche at the moment is sites that have reformatted and improved content have done well, sites that may have remained stagnant have not. Don't get me wrong our blog is active and so is our social media but the main site pages have not improved at all for the very reason they may not have required changes.

It's just a guess but this seems to be a "fresh & care" update in my opinion, and it's only limited to the 50-80 sites I watch in our niche (Home & Garden)

I think those that seem to have come out with new content ideas and improved the page have done well and those who have stuck with just posting anything or nothing at all have dropped. Which I guess is "fair"

What I will say is a competitor who has a private PBN (that I am aware of) with spun and rehashed content or had it outsourced have dropped hard - but this could also be down the their PBN or anything else being discovered I guess..

A few coffee sites I visit with mass authors 50+ seem to have dropped as well but I don't know if that's related to mass content or they are spinning content or something totally different I've not had a deep dive into it all outside of our niche as I have said to confirm this or not.


Again I've only taken a small sample pool of data I have had I'm no SEO Guru by any shot of the imagination, but to me this update seems to be based around content / information.


It's quite possible what you're saying is true. I have my suspicions though that the update is still being rolled out - meaning we shouldn't make any calls just yet about what's going on.

I have a site in the gardening niche that has decent EAT and also good recent quality content and it got hit hard on 12/9 across the board with all of its keywords. I've been seeing some slow crawling back to its positions (not anywhere close to prior but it's only been 2 days). My site is a newer site. I have a suspicion that they're new algorithm may be doing some A/B type of testing for whatever metrics they're looking at.

But who knows ..maybe I just have wishful thinking.
 
FYI: Update is still rolling out, you won't find patterns yet.

You do upsell as you have done so with me.

I don't feel in any way bad about this as I see nothing wrong with it as you do provide helpful info.

But to say you don't upsell is not the truth.

You help people, upsell and also ask for pieces of the website in exchange for your help.

I see nothing wrong with this personally. I'm not bashing you.

Imho Splishsplash is a too nice person and pretty great at SEO. He never used any shady tactics and he provided a lot of value for free than most did after i paid them. People should beg to work with him and he doesn't deserve to be called out.
 
The update is still rolling out, and there are still movements in the SERPs

Schermata 2020-12-11 alle 17.25.47.png
 
The update is still rolling out, and there are still movements in the SERPs


I agree - 4-5 days ago, one of my primary keywords went to #1, then after 24-48 hours, it came down again, and now it is back to #1. A/B testing like what @jarjarb52 mentioned.
 
It's quite possible what you're saying is true. I have my suspicions though that the update is still being rolled out - meaning we shouldn't make any calls just yet about what's going on.

I have a site in the gardening niche that has decent EAT and also good recent quality content and it got hit hard on 12/9 across the board with all of its keywords. I've been seeing some slow crawling back to its positions (not anywhere close to prior but it's only been 2 days). My site is a newer site. I have a suspicion that they're new algorithm may be doing some A/B type of testing for whatever metrics they're looking at.

But who knows ..maybe I just have wishful thinking.

Agree it's still being rolled out I'm just looking to see what happened Friday - Friday so far and from what I've noticed what I posted is my take away from it.

I could be totally wrong about the whole thing :) I guess no one knows and my sample pooling of data isn't massive so it's not going to be accurate I'm just looking at my niche and seeing what's going on.

As mentioned I'm no SEO guru by any standards but comparing who and what has moved and what changes we recorded on their sites the last few months, thats why I feel fairly confident in what has happened.

I am also garden niche ;)
 
My new website got completely destroyed (down 90%) and now it's slowly getting back to how it was before the update.

In my opinion, the update is being canceled
 
I have noticed even brands keyword are sometimes not showing in search results. Even a famous brand with followers in million in LinkedIn was not getting shown few times back and after repeated search now it is visible again.
 
My new website got completely destroyed (down 90%) and now it's slowly getting back to how it was before the update.

In my opinion, the update is being canceled
oh boy....i think they are only starting...

i am receiving almost exactly the same number of visitors every day. and the numbers of daily impressions in GSC same as well.
it looks like a total plateau in analytics. looks unnatural.
 
Honestly since Panda-Penguin which eliminated very crappy websites Google hasn't improved its search engine.
Links are still key and Google has a hard time to determinate the quality of a page without it. I even have the impression they became lazier and try to save the crawling budget by giving a pass to autorithy websites without much search more and more.
The recent sponsored link was a pure joke and a desperate attempt to get a better view of links with the help of webmasters.
 
bd70fb90a17f49cb3045d5ca45079eb4.png


It's not over yet guys so don't get too happy/sad just yet. There will still be major changes happening for at least the next 5 days

(I didn't ask Danny this, this isn't me)
 
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