Google Core Update Recovery — A Calgary Business Owner’s Action Plan

Your Rankings Vanished. Here’s What Actually Happened.

You checked your analytics on a Monday morning and your organic traffic had fallen off a cliff. Leads that were coming through Google Search have dried up. Your website, which was on page one for your most important keywords, is now nowhere to be found.

If this happened between mid-December 2025 and early January 2026, you were hit by the December 2025 Google Core Update. This was one of the most impactful updates in recent memory, with nearly 15% of pages previously ranking in the top 10 dropping completely out of the top 100.

But core updates don’t hit businesses at random. They hit businesses whose websites have accumulated quality and trust issues that Google’s improved algorithms can now detect. The good news: these issues are fixable. The bad news: it requires honest assessment and real work, not quick fixes.

What Core Updates Actually Evaluate

Google’s core updates recalibrate how the algorithm weighs quality signals across the entire web. They’re not penalties targeting specific behaviours. They’re broad reassessments of which content genuinely serves searchers best.

The December 2025 update specifically intensified evaluation of these signals:

Content helpfulness. Is your content written to rank, or written to help? Pages filled with keyword-stuffed marketing copy that say the same thing competitors say get demoted. Pages that demonstrate genuine experience and provide actionable information get promoted.

E-E-A-T across the site. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Google now evaluates these at the site level, not just the page level. One excellent page on a site full of thin content gets dragged down by the weak pages around it.

Structured data integrity. Sites with contradictory schema markup, multiple conflicting entity declarations, or missing structured data on key pages saw disproportionate drops.

Domain age and history. Newer domains needed significantly stronger quality signals to maintain rankings. Established domains with long histories of consistent content weathered the update better.

The Recovery Framework

Step 1: Identify What Actually Dropped (Week 1)

Don’t assume everything dropped equally. In Google Search Console, compare the 30 days before the update to the 30 days after. Identify which specific pages lost impressions and clicks, which keywords declined, and which pages actually maintained or gained rankings.

This analysis reveals whether you have a site-wide quality problem or specific page-level issues. The recovery strategy differs significantly depending on the answer.

Step 2: Content Audit and Triage (Weeks 1-2)

Evaluate every indexable page on your site. Place each page into one of three categories: Keep (provides genuine value, demonstrates expertise), Improve (has potential but needs substantial rewriting), or Remove/Noindex (thin, duplicate, outdated, or written purely for search engines rather than humans).

Be ruthless. If a page wouldn’t exist except to rank for a keyword, it’s hurting you. Noindex or delete it. A smaller site with uniformly excellent content outranks a larger site with inconsistent quality.

Step 3: Fix Technical Foundations (Weeks 2-3)

Audit and fix your schema markup. Standardize your NAP across every page. Fix any conflicting entity declarations. Ensure every service page has proper Service schema. Validate all structured data at validator.schema.org.

Check for crawlability issues: broken internal links, 404 errors, redirect chains, orphaned pages. Fix your sitemap if it references non-existent pages. Ensure your robots.txt isn’t blocking important resources.

Step 4: Rebuild Content with Experience Signals (Weeks 3-8)

For every page in your “Improve” category, rewrite with genuine expertise. Include first-person experience signals: specific client outcomes, real project details, practitioner-level knowledge that a generalist couldn’t produce. Add case studies with actual metrics. Embed client testimonials. Show your work.

Remove generic content that could have been written by anyone. Replace marketing language with informational language. Answer real questions with real answers.

Step 5: Strengthen E-E-A-T Signals (Ongoing)

Add or improve your About page with genuine biographical details and credentials. Ensure every blog post has an author bio. Build external signals: get mentioned in industry publications, contribute guest posts to authoritative sites, maintain active professional social profiles.

Timeline Expectations

Google processes core updates over weeks, not days. After making fixes, you need to wait for the next core update for full reassessment. Based on 2025 cadence (March, June, December), the next update will likely arrive in March or April 2026.

Implement your fixes now to allow Google sufficient time to recrawl and reindex your improved pages before the next update window. Partial recovery can happen between updates as Google recrawls individual pages, but the full impact is realized when the next core update evaluates your site holistically.

When to Call a Professional

If your rankings dropped more than 30-40% and you’re not sure why, a professional audit is the fastest path to recovery. At MRC SEO Consulting, we perform detailed core update impact assessments that identify exactly which pages and signals were affected and prioritize fixes by recovery potential.

Our website audit covers everything in this guide and more, delivered as a prioritized action plan you can implement immediately. Get your site assessed before the next core update window.