You may not have heard about it, but you’ve likely felt some of the reverberations: Google unleashed a major core update to its search algorithm at the beginning of December.
Although Google says it constantly fine-tunes its algorithm, this was the first major update since May. While an update was overdue – Google usually averages around three major updates a year – the timing of this one, right in the middle of the holiday season, was an unwelcome surprise.
Websites that track Google changes identified the December update as more dramatic than the May rollout. Results fluctuated for websites across a wide range of industries in all geographic areas on both desktop and mobile platforms. Some sites reported traffic drops of as much as 40% because of the update.