Just saw
this from
@LilyRayNYC :
I know
Glenn Gabe,
Barry Schwartz and some others have shared that there was significant ranking volatility on Google since about ~Jan 21 (a couple weeks after the December core update was officially done).
I dug in today to look at some of the affected sites and was surprised to see a handful of very large brands seeing major impact. The first screenshot shows various blogs from big brands (b2b/SaaS/insurance shown here) that have seen big drops since Jan 21. Zooming in, the drops are mostly isolated to the company's blogs/article sections.
I looked at their blogs and what most of them had in common was just a ton of informational who/what/when/where definition type content for various concepts within their niche. In some cases, the content strayed from the site's core purpose (emoji meaning, motivational quotes, etc.) which has definitely been proven to be risky for SEO in the last couple years.
Also, one of these sites shows '2026' in the <title> of every single one of its 300+ tutorials, even when the page content is about 2025 or earlier... (not sketchy at all!)
In the second screenshot, this is a subfolder containing 500+ resume templates from a resume builder site. All page <titles> use the exact same formula (and of course all end with '2026'). All page templates are highly similar and the example resumes shown on the page are all gated. All of the pages misuse AggregateRating Schema to get star ratings in the SERP. Many pages contain obvious AI content.
I wonder if Google is rolling out new measures to automatically detect/demote low-quality, scaled, highly templated programmatic content.
