Google Search is the largest search engine of the web. Relied on by billions of people, Google has that many reasons to keep it updated.
And this time, Google has confirmed its third core algorithm update for this 2020. What Google calls the 'December 2020 Core Update', the update was delayed for quite some times, if compared to the average times between core updates.
This is likely due to the 'COVID-19' coronavirus pandemic.
The company confirmed the change on December 3rd on Twitter.
As a core update, the change is huge, and can take a few days to over two weeks to completely finish rolling out.
As expected, and just like many times before, the news received immediate response from lots of webmasters, web owners and the SEO community in general.
In a blog post, Google once said that:
"Sometimes, an update may be more noticeable. We aim to confirm such updates when we feel there is actionable information that webmasters, content producers or others might take in relation to them."
"Several times a year, we make significant, broad changes to our search algorithms and systems. We refer to these as 'core updates'. They’re designed to ensure that overall, we’re delivering on our mission to present relevant and authoritative content to searchers."
In the past, Google Search core updates can affect many websites.
Because there is no reason for Google for not repeating the exact same thing, many webmasters, web owners and SEO specialists are expecting the worst after hearing this kind of update.
This is why, just like many times in the past, many are panicking. Anxiety piled up as many people await how the algorithms update will impact their site.
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.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 3, 2020
It's through this kind of update that Google rewards websites for their optimization efforts they've done for the past several months.
And at the same time, it's also a way for Google to punish websites by giving them negative ranks if they don't follow the rules of keeping the web informational the way Google wants them to be.
What this means, sites that have been diligently working toward improving their rankings may see a positive results, even when they were affected negatively in previous core updates.
On the other hand, sites that have not worked hard to create compelling and optimized contents may see a negative results, even when they were benefited from past core changes.
Changes in search rankings, either positive or negative, are indicative of content relevancy.
While Google rarely disclose the changes in its algorithms and how those changes will affect websites, the impact should be noticeable for Google Search users in all countries in all languages.