What to Expect for Your Website & SEO Strategy

Google Search Status Dashboard as an “incident affecting ranking” expected to complete within three weeks for all searches.

Google’s intention with the Core Updates are to improve Google’s ranking algorithms in order to serve better search results to users. Unlike Spam Updates, or other updates focused on ranking factors, or tackling spam in certain areas such as product reviews, Core Updates are broad changes to Google’s algorithms that evaluate content in order to determine the best results for users conducting searches on the web.

What Is a Google Core Update?

In general terms, Google’s core updates are the biggest changes to Google’s search ranking algorithms. These are NOT the same as spam updates, or product review updates. These are updates to how Google’s algorithms look at content for ranking purposes.

The core updates don’t penalize any websites for reasons unknown to website owners. The updates change how Google’s algorithm rates sites and measures their quality relative to other competing websites.

Just because your site has been rated, does not mean that your site will go up and down for no apparent reason. As your site will be compared against all other competing pages, all Core Updates are designed to make Google’s search results more accurate. However, this does not mean that all results will automatically become more accurate overnight.

December 2025 Core Update: What’s New?

The Google December 2025 Core Update is now live. The roll out of this update is expected to take up to three weeks to complete, and already we are seeing some wild ranking swings here at Search Engine Journal as the update makes its way around the globe. Just as with past Core Updates, the December 2025 update will cause websites to see ranking increases and/or decreases in the rankings, and this can occur even if no changes have been made to the pages on the website in question.

As the update goes through the entire Google index, there will be several up- and down-rankings on your website before the update is fully complete. Some of these changes might even reverse back to their previous state before the update has completed. We advise you not to act on these changes until the update has been completed.

Just because a site goes down in rankings in a core update does not mean you have to do something. Wait for the update to complete (typically around 3 weeks) and then reassess if your site has come back to where it was.

Looking Back at 2025’s Core Updates

Unfortunately for the search industry though, Google is already continuing to roll out what will likely be a large update following their three core updates in the first quarter of 2025, the December 2025 Core Update.

It has been a number of months since the December 2024 Core Update took place and Google has confirmed that a new update is rolling out – the December 2025 Core Update which has started to roll out globally and will take around three weeks to complete and as with previous updates will likely result in ranking fluctuations as well as increases and decreases in organic traffic and also changes in keyword rankings over the coming weeks.

June 2025 Core Update

The June 2025 update took place between the 30th of June and the 17th of July with an approximate duration of 16 days. There are a few SEO tools in the industry that track updates such as Ranking by Ahrefs, and they have deemed this update one of the largest Google algorithm updates in recent years.

There were some initial observations of partial reversals of ranking trends for sites that previously suffered in rankings following the September 2023 Helpful Content Update. These changes and trends were picked up by various SEO tools as well as by several industry tracking platforms and were reported by owners of sites impacted by the September update within the respective tools’ tracking platforms during the update’s rollout of core search ranking signals.

Google Clarifies Continuous Algorithm Updates

Google updated the information about Core Updates 2 days prior to the beginning of the December Core Update.

The Documentation on how core updates work for search ranking algorithms by Google was revised two days prior to releasing the December Core Update. A new detail was added to that documentation. The new detail was that (smaller) core updates already are made continually by Google, and that those updates do not need to be announced by Google as core updates, since they do not cause noticeable changes in the search results, whereas larger core updates do cause such changes and thus are announced by Google already.

Google has clarified their documentation regarding how core updates work. The biggest change is that core updates are not limited to the large updates which Google publicly announces. Instead, Google is continuously making updates to search algorithms – including core updates – of sizes big and small, which Google does not publicly announce as they generally do not result in noticeable changes across all of search.

Good to know for SEO’ers, as well as for online businesses, that there are many small updates being applied to Google’s search algorithm, outside of the announced Core Updates. These can cause search rankings to improve as well. As before, continuously optimizing a website for search, will lead to positive rankings changes, between the big Core Updates as well.

This also means that the on-going work you do to optimize your site will result in rankings going up before, during and between announced updates to search algorithm core updates.

What This Means for Website Owners

If you find your rankings have dropped it’s highly likely to be the December Core Update, so please bear in mind that ranking drops are not due to technical issues on your site and are not a result of SEO errors. Google’s core updates reevaluate your content against other pages on the web and determine if your content is still the best in relation to the user

Just because your rankings have dropped does not necessarily mean there are issues with your website. Google’s algorithm is simply rating your website’s content against the content of other websites that Google has crawled for similar search terms. It is ranking your content against competing content and determining which best to return to the search user based on their intent. Therefore, a decrease in rankings is likely due to your website’s content being rated lower than competing content that Google’s algorithm believes to be more helpful to users.

Conversely, your rankings might also increase in the weeks following the update as Google’s algorithms re-evaluate competing content and determine your content to be more useful to users than said competing pages.

Wait for update to complete before making any big changes for SEO on your website. So wait for the articles to finish re-ranking before making any changes for SEO – whether it be for technical SEO fixes or others. As the updates are re-ranking articles in the search results as you read them, you’ll probably do more harm than good in the short term by making changes and then the updates re-ranking your articles again afterwards.

Best Practices During the Rollout

While it is wise to react on a daily basis during the rollout, most of the time it is wiser to wait until the update has completed and then follow these best practices during the after hours.

• Monitor keyword rankings throughout the rollout.
• Use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track organic traffic to your website during the update.
• Document when significant ranking movements occur.
• Compare changes against Google’s published rollout timeline.

Be extremely cautious and never make any significant changes to your SEO strategy during a core update rollout. While it is a good idea to fix obvious technical issues on your site, any other changes to your SEO strategy will likely have negative effects on your rankings. Only after the update has completed should you make any changes or evaluations of the effects of the update on your website.

Wait for the update to complete before attempting to enhance your rankings via changes to your SEO.

We are anticipating that the December 2025 Core Update will be completed within two to three weeks at which point Google will announce the update has completed via the Google Search Status Dashboard as well as Google’s Search Central blog and other communication channels related to Search.

Once Google has confirmed that the update has rolled out completely (you can check this via the Google Search Status Dashboard as well as Search Central channels), then review your site’s performance in terms of rankings over time, not individual keyword positions.

After the update has completed and the rankings on your site have stopped changing, it is time to look at the bigger picture and measure the performance of your entire site. Most successful SEO efforts result in improved search engine rankings for a number of relevant keywords, not just for a single term. Focus your efforts on continually improving the content of your site in order to create higher quality pages with better user experience, higher topical authority, and greater expertise.

It looks like the December 2025 Core Update is going to be another update that receives a lot of press in the search marketing world. The largest changes to Google’s search algorithms, however, occur on an on-going basis throughout the year. In fact, Google states that there are many minor updates to their search ranking algorithms released every year.

No, we don’t need to comment any further on this update as businesses and online marketers alike are by now well aware that creating great quality authoritative and helpful content will see it perform well in search, before a core update takes place, during a core update and after a core update has passed.