Google revealed its May 2022 Core Update on May 25, after a week of speculation from the SEO community. According to Danny Sullivan, Google Public Liaison for Search, the deployment will take one to two weeks. According to early reports, the update affects all types of content, languages, and areas around the world.

Google emphasized in its statement that core updates aim to improve the overall ranking process by boosting the relevancy of search results and “keeping pace with the changing nature of the web.”

Google’s algorithm is updated several times a year with these changes. Google, on the other hand, only verifies updates that are expected to have a large influence on rankings.

As per Google:

We confirm broad core updates because they typically produce some widely notable effects. Some sites may note drops or gains during them. We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things. Moreover, there might not be anything to fix at all.

There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor 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.

SEO expert Ritika Rajan says “I believe this statement will have a delayed effect… barely a week ago, we witnessed a lot of volatility and changes in the SERPs.”

Many other SEO professionals also raised similar concerns as they did notice fluctuations in the rankings while optimizing their websites.

What to do if you are impacted?

In the past, Google has offered suggestions on what to do if you’ve been negatively affected by a core upgrade. There are no precise steps to follow to get back on track, and a drop in rankings may not indicate anything is wrong with your pages.

If your site is affected by a core change, Google has provided a list of questions to consider. According to Google, there is some recovery time between core upgrades, but the major shift comes after another core update.

What is Core Update?

In 2018, Google confirmed a sort of update that would later be known as a broad core algorithm update for the first time. There was nothing special to “repair” for any sites affected by these upgrades, according to Google. Every year since 2018, Google has released three of these upgrades.

Some broad core algorithms updates are implemented rapidly, while others took up to 14 days to complete. When the impact is spread out rather than occurring on the same day as the change is published or confirmed, it complicates data analysis.

All of these factors can make it difficult to attribute ranking declines to a single Google shift. Many of Google’s search adjustments have no direct impact on ranking, so we don’t notice or know about them all. However, some modifications do have an impact on ranking.

If your website is affected by any broad core update, get in touch with our expert SEO team at 1Solutions. We will analyze the different factors and help your website recover successfully.