Introduction where...
I discovered some oddities and trends on the chart in GSC which I would like to talk about in this article. The bottom line is, the positions of my site have grown very much if we compare the same positions during the entire last year until mid-September 2025. Here is the weekly chart:
I think it's perfectly clear that the position has shifted from 28-26 positions to 10-12 positions. But at the same time, the number of impressions did not increase much. Also, the graph shows that since January 2026, there has been a significant increase in shows and, as a result, in clicks.
I would like to write here something like, "What could be the reason for this?" but alas, you already read either the title or the snippet from the search, so you know that the growth of positions is related to the Google spam update in August 2025, and the growth of visitors in January 2026 is the reaction to the Google core update in December 2025.
Therefore, this is a short answer, but if you want a more detailed answer with depth and how I came to this, then I invite you to proceed further, deep into the article.
Analysis of the general trends
First of all, I jump into a new Insights tab in Google Search Console. See where popularity grows and where it decreases.
This should give me a starting point where you can look for the reason for such behavior. And here's what I found. It was on these articles that a sharp increase in popularity began from the beginning of the year. The final growth in clicks was +353:
And the flow of people decreased on these articles. The final decline was -54:
I also checked the changes of popularity in queries. The picture is the same: growth on all fronts for the last 28 days by +83.
And there is no decline anywhere. The total losses of clicks were -3 clicks.
And this did not really help, because growth is observed throughout the site and not on specific articles or tools. There was something that pushed me into the top 10 positions in September, and something else happened in December, which gave additional impressions in January 2026.
And at first I thought I understood...
Why did the position of the website grow up, and the impressions were down? Then I stumbled upon this news where it is said that in September 2025, Google abruptly turned off the ability to parse through its API 100 SERP positions at a time. This number is now limited to 10.
That is, all pages that appeared in positions above 10 will now not be taken into account in the reports. This means that the growth of positions is a result of the decline in impressions. Such is at least a theory that doesn't really fit my site very well.
So, I began to dig deeper and compare the charts. Below is a comparison of the period for June-August with the period for September-November:
But as can be seen from the graph, the drop in impressions not only did not happen but even went up — +30 thousand. A trend was also noticed (not by me but others) that PCs are more prone to this jump; let's see at the table below:
The position has improved for everyone, and significantly. You can even see that there was an increase in the number of impressions for all devices. So what is the reason for this growth?
I have such a rule that if something strange happens on the chart, you should always look for the reason "inside" the site and only then "outside". What I mean by "inside" that it can be meta tag optimization, the appearance of new content, the improvement of the design, or the backend of the site itself. In short, everything that depends on you as the owner of the site.
And I’ll say right away that I didn’t do anything that could radically change the position of the site in Google search, according to all materials. Yes, I changed raw CSS styles to TailwindCSS and almost everywhere replaced pure JS with HTMx. This helped to better structure this site and project to develop and improve it in the future, but no more. I also did not publish articles more often than usual, because I simply cannot do this. In short, the reason is certainly external.
Google Search Updates
After a little search and research, I finally figured out a list of the latest Google search core updates. And indeed, there are two key updates:
- August spam update (Google Spam Update) — the rollout lasted 26 days, starting from August 26 to September 20.
- December key update (Google Core Update) — the rollout lasted 18 days, starting from December 11 to December 29
Below, I will analyze these two updates in more detail to understand what happened to me and to other sites. I'll start with spam updates.
Spam update from August 26, 2025
You can learn more about spam updates here, on the official Google's blog for developers. But in a nutshell, with each new spam update, Google updates spam content detection algorithms and adds its new types and varieties.
What is meant by spam, you can read in more detail on this page from Google. I will only give a brief table of techniques that are considered spammy:
| Cloaking | Roughly speaking, users are shown one site and search robots another. |
| Doorway | Such sites/pages are sharpened only for a specific request and forward users to other resources. |
| Drop domains | The domain has one theme but started to be used for another. |
| Hacked content | If the site was hacked and they began to upload content to it without the permission of the site owner. |
| Hidden text | There is a hidden text on the site/page that is not visible to people but is visible to robots. |
| Keyword spam | Overuse of keywords in texts and meta tags in order to manipulate search results. |
| Link spam | When a site links a lot of low-quality domains and links, they are often spam. |
| Machine traffic | Traffic generated by machines to the target site in order to manipulate the ranking system in the search |
| Malware | Site that promotes malware. |
| Misleading functionality | The site promises one functionality but provides a completely different one. |
| Scaled content factories | Creating a lot of useless pages for the user, using automation, scraping, and other techniques leading to low-quality content. |
| Scraping | Copying content from one site (original) to another in order to manipulate the ranking system. |
| Guest posts (abuse of site authority) | Content publication that does not meet the requirements of the guest site created specifically to promote low-quality content through a quality resource. |
| Hidden redirects | This is such a redirection where the user thinks that they will fall on one page and falls to another. |
| Thin affiliation | These are pages/sites that create links to partners without any additional content on such a page/site. |
| Spam generated by users | Such spam means created user accounts and comments that do not carry any weight. |
| Spam equipment | Description |
|---|
After this update, all those who fell under the category of "Spam Content" either fell out of the search altogether or were greatly pessimized in search results. Which greatly raised me to the top, as we see. Well, I’ll say this: how much spam should there be between me and the top 10 to throw me as much as 18 positions up? It’s scary to think.
Core update on December 11, 2025
Further, more recently, there was a core update of the search in December. Which led to a change in the work of ranking and search algorithms. These updates generally affect all sites, and no one knows what exactly has changed, because Google prefers not to talk about it. But everyone sees the consequences: someone wins, and someone loses.
And of course, I want to speculate on this topic. And if not to know for sure, then at least understand the existing trends and shifts in Google Search for the next 2026.
So, according to the article, the most significant changes in the operation of algorithms are as follows:
- Content authenticity assessment — Now Google algorithms are able to better recognize the expertise of the author of the material and the materials themselves.
- Enhancement of the importance of EEAT signals — Now even more weighty than before for any sites.
- Enhancement of AI Detection Processing Process — Google will now better recognize the generated content and define if it is useful to the end user or not.
- Strengthening the influence of behavioral factors — Behavioral factors such as pogosticking, long clicks, time spent on the site, and direct visits to the site will have more weight to rank than before.
- Improved recognition of updated content — Now it is not enough to change the update date. The content itself should be updated, and some additional value should be added to it.
A couple of thoughts about a new AI detector. In this update, Google has updated its AI-generated content detector and it seems to me that so far, algorithms tolerate such content as long as it is useful to users.
After all, judge for yourself. It is very important for Google to save Gemini, and so that it gives the most accurate answers, and for this it is necessary to slow down the degradation and hallucination of the model itself. You can do this, as I see it, only by feeding it more and more content created by people, preferably content that is ranked best.
To do this, the search must exist in the form in which it existed before AI. That is, the network must be constantly filled with human content so that generative intelligence continues to be useful. And for this, sites must receive traffic. And for this ... I don't know what Gemini should do to make the circle close. In theory, redirect traffic to the best pages, but this almost doesn't happen. at least not in the right scale and volume.
In conclusion...
I would like to add that I am very glad that my site ended up in the top 23% those who noticed the positive effect of the last update. Although only a month has passed since the end of the December update rollout, the effect is already visible.
And I hope your site has also acquired a couple of positions over the past six months and the latest update did not completely destroy your site. How did your site react to Google's latest update? Share this in the comments, I'll be glad to discuss :)
