December has been a busy month for SEOs following the rollout of Google’s latest broad core algorithm update, which arrived on 3rd December and is likely around two-thirds complete, according to the search giant’s own timescale.
It has now been around two weeks since the update went live and notable winners and losers are emerging, with research from data providers indicating that the latest tweaks have had a major impact on SERPs.
In its formal analysis, Search Engine Land believes that the update was “very big”, dwarfing even the core update in May, which was one of the three major updates that Google implemented during the calendar year.
Data from SEMrush Sensor appears to back up this theory as it found that the average SERP volatility peaked at 9.4 the day after the update went live (4th December). That figure puts it in the same ballpark as the May update and higher than the January update.
Rank Ranger, a SaaS company, also stated that the latest update was “a major one” that resulted in “more changes than the May update in some areas, especially in the top three results”.
The rank volatility for the three positions in December stands at 55% versus the 38% in May, though the top five results flipped in the other direction.
However, overall, December’s core update does appear to have had much more of an impact, as Rank Ranger’s average position change for the top 20 rankings shows a two times increase in fluctuations when compared to May’s.
Google’s Search Liaison account on Twitter confirmed that the update would take up to two weeks to fully roll out, so it should have filtered through completely by Christmas Day at the very latest.
While it is still another week until that date, there have already been two specific days that were particularly volatile. The Hack My Growth channel on YouTube recently posted a video that noted that volatility on both 4th December and 10th December was very high.
Winners and losers
Due to this increased volatility and the fact that pretty much everyone is in agreement that the update has been significant, it should come as no surprise that there have been some big winners and losers during the last 10 days or so.
SEMrush claims that the most affected industries are currently Health, Law, Government and Real Estates, with these industries being impacted across desktop and mobile.
The categories of Travel and Finance were also experiencing high volatility on desktop. On mobile, sites within Pets & Animals and Jobs & Education have also seen some disruption.
More worrying for big business is that larger domains appear to be the most affected. A third of domains that have been aware of drops in visibility since early December regularly draw more than 10m visitors each month.
When broken down more specifically, 33.2% of the ‘losing domains’ generate more than 10m visitors, meaning that these sites fared much worse than those with 1m-10m traffic (17.8%) and 500k-1m (10.00%).
In contrast, the ‘winning domains’ were spread more evenly across domain sizes. While some big sites lost out, others benefited as 27.30% of winners have 10m visitors or more. Smaller sites have also shot up the rankings. 22.70% of winners have 50k or less visitors.
As noted earlier, there are certain categories that won or lost more than most. According to SEMrush, the top 10 categories with winning domains are:
- Business & Industrial
- Internet & Telecom
- Beauty & Fitness
- Arts & Entertainment
- Online Communities
- Pets & Animals
- Shopping
- Computers & Electronics
- Sports
- Autos & Vehicles
The sites that have been termed “winners” were able to gain 20 positions in SERPs on average following the update, but some jumped more than that. Zoominfo.com, for example, gained 67 positions, while LinkedIn and eBay surged by 47 and 44, respectively.
The top 10 categories with losing domains are:
- Online Communities
- Shopping
- News
- People & Society
- Health
- Games
- Computers & Electronics
- Finance
- Internet & Telecom
- Reference
Sites in industries that have struggled post-update have seen an average slump of 23 positions. But again, some have experienced more volatility, with yellowpages.com plummeting by 94 positions and newsbreak.com dropping 83.
As you can also see, there are overlaps in both winning and losing categories, which highlights how gains for certain sites in a sector can lead to notable losses for others. Where there is greater volatility, there are usually more winners and losers.
Searchmetrics has also weighed in on the impact of the latest update. It claimed that there are “some clear shifts in rankings in typical areas related to E-A-T and content – music, health, finance, news, and ecommerce.”
The digital marketing analytics company added: “Interesting is that some winners and losers from the last Core Update in May have gained or lost visibility, but only a few of them. Spotify and Twitch, who suffered major losses with the last update, have so far not yet shown signs of recovering.”
Google’s core update is still rolling out, so it will be a couple of weeks more until there is a complete picture of its impact, but with higher volatility days usually being front loaded, the initial data offers plenty of interesting and relevant insights.
What to focus on moving forward
Google’s updates don’t always affect every site, so you may not have experienced anything out of the ordinary during the last two weeks. However, it is worthwhile to be vigilant and keep an eye on any potential changes to traffic and visibility during December.
Google is very consistent with its advice for any domains that have been impacted, but unfortunately if you have suffered, there are not any immediate quick fixes you can implement.
You should instead aim to match Google’s general guidelines, which will stand you in good stead in the long term. This means:
- Investing in high-quality, relevant content that will provide value to users who navigate to your site.
- Implementing structured data to provide context and additional details about that content to help search engines.
- Fixing any SEO-specific issues on your site.
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