Google May 2022 Core Update Done Rolling Out

Google has announced this morning at 3:44am ET that the May 2022 broad core update is now done rolling out. Google said “The May 2022 core update rollout is now complete.” This comes a day after noticing a lot of volatility, so maybe today we will see much less volatility and things to start calming down.

Here is the set of announcements, announcing the roll out on May 25th and then it being complete on June 9th:

The May 2022 core update rollout is now complete.

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) June 9, 2022

I do think this was one of the bigger broad core updates we’ve seen in a while, bigger than the ones we saw all of 2021 – at least in terms of the impact it had on the SEO community.

Google May 2022 Broad Core Update Quick Facts

As a reminder, here are the quick facts that we know about this core update:

• Name: Google May 2022 Broad Core Update
• Launched: May 25, 2022 at around 11:30pm ET
• Rollout: It will take about one to two weeks to roll out (It took just about 15 days to roll out)
• Tremors: Tremors for this rollout were on May 26th, June 5th, June 7th and more…
• Completed: June 9, 2022 at around 3:45am ET
• Targets: It looks at all types of content
• Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
• Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
• Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
• Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
• Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
• Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

I will say, as of this morning, the SEO chatter in the communities seem to have slowed down a bit? We will see if we see any more tremors and chatter spike in the next 48 hours or so and report back.
Here is some of the chatter from WebmasterWorld after the update was complete:

Well I was a winner in this core update in terms of improved average positions, but website traffic is down 32% and YouTube traffic up 37%. Looking at the serps my YouTube videos have overtaken my articles so guess that all makes sense! Still a shame we have to put in so much time into youtube (2k subs gets about 80p per day,so a lot of work for not a lot)

At this time yesterday all was looking good however this morning as flat as a pancake across all sites including normally bouyant localised UK sites. My global .com has turned into a one page hit wonder at the moment and US visitors have all but disappeared.

If it’s complete then it’s time to check my SERPs because this is not looking good right now.

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SERPs are not correlating very closely with traffic. I am having very small moves in ranking this year, in a generally upward trend of gaining more top 3 / top 10 spots…but traffic is fluctuating wildly from day to day now. Checking the SERPs shows why…Google is adding so much to the page that ranking highly doesn’t mean traffic. And Google is clearly constantly experimenting with layouts and features on the fly. People mistakenly assumed that the goal of Google’s AI was to provide better results…it’s actually to find the best ways to raise revenue and keep all the traffic while alienating as few people as possible. Many days the results just look like a jumbled mess…information overload.

Google Tracking Tools

The tools may need 24 hours or so to show a drop in volatility but here is what we see right now from them.

Semrush:

Mozcast:

RankRanger:

SERPmetrics:

Algoroo:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Cognitive SEO:

SERPstat:

Accuranker:

Again, these tools may need a day to cool down a bit…

I see the comments in these forums and around the SEO community – this was a big update that hurt a lot of you (and it seemed to hit this site as well). I feel for you and I hope things get better for most of you all soon.

Forum discussion at Twitter & WebmasterWorld.