Last week, Google started to roll out its latest major algorithm change, the ‘May 2022 broad core update.’ This is the first major algorithm revamp to rock the SEO industry since November 2021.
“Several times per year, we make substantial improvements to our overall ranking processes, which we refer to as core updates,” Google Public Liaison for Search Danny Sullivan explained on the company’s Search Central blog on May 25. “Core updates are designed to increase the overall relevancy of our search results and make them more helpful and useful for everyone.”
“It will take about 1-2 weeks to fully roll out,” he added.
At GrowthEngine, we like to notify our SEO customers every time a core update or other major algorithm tweak is released because these changes have the capacity to cause sudden, drastic changes in search visibility, which can impact site traffic, leads, and even a company’s bottom line.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing to be done about these sudden ranking fluctuations. As Google noted in its May 25 post: “There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor have been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those guidelines. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better.”
Often, our SEO clients that experience sudden ranking declines during a broad core update see their rankings improve drastically days or weeks later. The same goes for clients that see sudden ranking improvements – the gains are sometimes short-lived. Our course of action will be to sit back and observe these fluctuations. If after two to three weeks your site has not rebounded, we can look at changes to fit with Google’s updated best practices.
Contact us today if you have questions or concerns.
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