Google Broad Core Update May 2022

Google Announces Update

[Brett_Tabke]

Core Update.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/05/may-2022-core-update

[javelin]

@ichthyous

I could start to get that traffic back if I sat and wrote how-to articles all day...but would that traffic be targeted? It wouldn't help me sell more product, it would only help me if I were willing to run ads on those pages? I would be a waste of time to try to convert people seeking information into customers of products if their original intent is not to shop to begin with.

Thankfully I am not ecommerce driven. I have one but it is not my main concern. The work I do elsewhere does drive some sales but the scenario you just presented is what I have. You are right there is no way to target the audience in the methods I described that I use. Thus the weakness of information or research based sites.

The crazy part to this is that it would require you to be able to brand and establish a larger corporate style footprint in order to get anywhere. Figuring out this problem, if it can be, is not going to be easy. There must be a way... and to whoever finds it then hats off to you.

[Jori]

Huge improvments here in positions. Traffic? Inconclusive, as it's holiday time for me.

Lot of better positions, yes, but from 74th place to 23th. Yeah.

Let's see how it evolve...

[Broaster]

Published 3 articles when I got back home from work, checked back now and 4 visits one hour, 10 visits the other hour, and 5 visits, and now 3 visits last hour

Horrible.

[Neohippy]

Yesterday not quite as bad as I feared... c. -17% on last Thursday, with particular losses on UGC. The watching & waiting continues...

[engine]

There's lots of weirdness going on in Google SERPs right now.

I'm holding judgement until the roll-out is complete.

[Alex_1729]

35% down in traffic today compared to the same day the previous week. Rankings continue to drop.

SERPs don't make sense, therefore expecting to bounce back, but the stats are difficult to look at.

[SteveWrz]

Some numbers from my 5 sites.

Yesterday compared to previous week

Info site, oldest of them all, +54%
Info site, 8 years old +51%
Info site, 1.5 years old, +34%
Info/Affiliate/CPA offer site -5%
Pure Affiliate site -80%

[ichthyous]

My ranking is holding steady and actually slightly increasing in the last two days, but traffic is abysmal...very sluggish and well below normal. My home page and main landing pages were down 34%-56% yesterday from an average Thursday.

As expected, the steep drop recovered somewhat in the evening between 5pm and 10pm, as has been the pattern for months. Today USA and UK are down 20%-38%. Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland and most of Western Europe are at -100% (zero visits)...but I do have tons of traffic from East Europe and Asia!:

India
+127%
Malaysia
0%
Ukraine
+354%
Belarus
0%
Estonia
0%
Hungary

Perhaps this update should be named "Iron Curtain"?

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:02 pm (utc) on May 27, 2022]

[ichthyous]

I am seeing a ton of individual and pointless social media posts showing up in searches...FB, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter...you name it. Some posts are very old and have no title, but are showing up ahead of a lot of much more important website pages. Hopefully that will vanish or the results are about to get a lot worse.

[RedBar]

USA traffic more than halved today therefore checked my SERPs and at the moment all looks ok ... I'll see where the numbers end up before having a serious in-depth Saturday afternoon where the roller-coaster is heading.

[not2easy]

The long weekend holiday may be a factor after 12:00 noon in your target US locale. Many (millions) of people are sort of offline 'til Tuesday for family, camping, travel, Memorial Day activities.

[JesterMagic]

Yeah I am not a fan when Google does these updates close to holiday long weekends.

[puckparches]

I hope everything goes back to normal, so far yesterday traffic was down about -20% on my largest site and about -8% on my second website. My other 5 websites are also down, but the traffic is irrelevant.

[emperor2]

After the recent core update, I have noticed a 30% drop in search traffic. It happened in 2019 June as well, almost 50% decrease (took time to realize then, I thought analytics issues). Hope this is a temporary change and will recover before the update is complete.
If search engines continue to favor big websites, small content marketers will not survive.
Congratulations to those who gained traffic!

[watesh]

Down 30%, been hit by all updates since December 2020. So far lost 80% of traffic since then and it looks like I'm headed to zero

[RedBar]

Ouch, ouch, ouch ... ok, it's a Saturday morning and over 8 hours gone, is my server down? Nope but several sites with 0 (zero) visitors so far, several with 1 (one) and another with 40 (forty) ... That's it for today folks !

[Alex_1729]

@emperor2

After the recent core update, I have noticed a 30% drop in search traffic. It happened in 2019 June as well, almost 50% decrease (took time to realize then, I thought analytics issues). Hope this is a temporary change and will recover before the update is complete.

Were you able to recover after that 50% decrease in June 2019, and how long did it took? Was it also broad core update such as this one?

[emperor2]

@Alex_1729 +
I was able to recover (~90%) from the 2019 core update. It was one of the major updates.
It took more than 8 months to reach close to previous traffic. During 2020 and 2021, traffic was average with low CPC.
Traffic improved after March 2022 until now. Hope it will settle back after a few ups and downs.

[RedBar]

Strange, I had a burst of traffic across all sites for about 90 minutes and then it stopped!

[Alex_1729]

@emperor2
Curious. As you were recovering, were you able to recover traffic to those specific articles, or were you adding new ones to try to get back up there where you were before?
I'm looking for something to hold on to, but I'd rather prefer a hard honest truth to at least get a sense of what to expect. Traffic keeps on dropping today as well. I never expected to be hit this much by an update.

[emperor2]

@Alex_1729
Since I have been through this, I can feel the pain and frustration.
I was able to recover traffic for most of the articles except a few. I have also updated those articles (content). I had submitted a disavow list to google to remove low /no value backlinks. I am not sure if it helped.
When a big brand publishes an article, it will get tons of backlinks within no time. This will push small blogs to the bottom. We have to continuously update/modify the content to show on the first page of google. Sometimes it will succeed, but most of the time very hard.

[christianz]

All sites down by various amounts and continue to slide. This is what I expected and what happens in every so called "update" - garbage floats to the top.

I noticed Quora now ranks for specific product questions like "How long is first generation blue plastic widget?" or "What is the gross weight of 2021 steel silver widget?"

Blatant scraper sites with Amazon aff links also rank in front of long established sites from which they scrape. For everything that is not Quora, YouTube, Reddit, Amazon etc., it's a random number generator that decides the ranking.

[engine]

Whilst this core update rolls out, Google's push on shopping in the SERPs is clear. It's lost so much ground to Amazon that it looks like a concerted effort to make some recoveries.
Also, i'm seeing Wikipedia having dropped a few slots.

Again, we'll have to see the end result when the roll out completes.

[robzilla]

No real discernable changes as of yet, so probably unaffected. A bit of a drop in non-US traffic YOY but nothing major.

[ichthyous]

Over the years I find that updates generally are set within a few days, not weeks. Traffic has definitely been lower the last two days, and odd traffic patterns. Western Europe and Canada vanished. Pages being returned from my own site are bizarre...the last page in a category as opposed to the first page, and sitelinks added from completely unimportant interior pages on the site. If that's the best AI Google can put forth it's sad.

Today traffic from Europe, UK and AU is back...but USA traffic is very low and CA still not one visit (in three days). Could be the holiday weekend...people are not sitting home on the computer. Ranking has barely moved this entire update...I suppose I should be thankful for that!

[samwest]

No change in rank, but now down to essentially zero traffic. The Stark Fist of Removal strikes again.

In another observation, my overall internet connectivity is third-world quality at best over the past few weeks. I'm supposed to have 400Mbps service, and it currently scores 370Mbps down and 24 Mbps up with a 19ms ping, yet nearly every website requires a 2nd refresh to load properly, first pass looks like it's missing CSS, second try loads OK. Videos timing out on YT, and sometimes the search page just doesn't load on the first pass. It's almost as if there is some other mystery layer slowing things down. Is anyone else seeing this? Everyone I talk to is saying the same thing. AWS is also super slow as well as most Gorg services, like Gmail. I'm sure the recent massive DDoS volume is not helping. We appear to be in the midst of a Cyber War. [horizon.netscout.com...]

[Tolomen]

My blog is losing Google positions every day - three days ago I had 140 KW's in TOP3 today I have only 114 KW's in TOP3.
Traffic is also down by about 30% and impressions in GSC are also down ... :(
I hope in the next few days everything will go back to normal again ...

[samwest]

The effects of whatever is going on are dramatic. Congratulations, we are now down to a $2/day income. This whole broken system should be scrapped and re-engineered on the blockchain.

[christianz]

This whole broken system should be scrapped and re-engineered on the blockchain.

Search ranking should be open like Linux or Bitcoin. But how can you create open ranking that can't be "openly" exploited?

Either way, current state of affairs cannot continue.

[javelin]

Well the fact that the entire front page of Google is ads of one kind or another tells the story. Whether you do well or not in Google does it really matter? Like others have said there needs to be another option. I agree with christianz that a Linux like idea would be the way to go.

Google will continue to degrade that system. Years have passed and nothing there has changed. Nothing will change today. Consider doing well there as a little icing on a cake. Consider doing poorly there par for the course. I hate it, but Bing is more friendly while still having its own issues.