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

[christianz]

Is anyone else here noticing an insanely low CPC these past 45 days?

I have noticed opposite - AdSense CPC/CPM was stable if not slightly up for me this year compared to last year, while CPM in competing Ad aggregator platform is down.

Now that I lost most US, UK, Canada traffic for that AdSense site, CPM will drop.

it dropped even further and now in june it's almost close to $0.01.

Why keep AdSense on that site if they are basically not paying you anything? It slows down load times and ruins your CWV, Page Exp scores.

[christianz]

@Alex_1729, @RedBar, @javelin

CMS choice (or choice of not using any popular CMS) should be irrelevant for ranking and any kind of quality assessment. They are all good tools for the job. Only annoyance with Wordpress is that its so popular - hackers constantly look for all kinds of subtle vulnerabilities and you have to constantly update it to avoid catastrophic security breach.

[Lisa01]

I lost all the keywords from all 3 of my websites. Even the images don’t appear on SERPs now. I don’t know what to do.

[carlweitz]

@Lisa01 all I have to say is: "run, you fools!".
It's a joke, but I must admit, we see a drastic change in SERP where informational keywords are now becoming commercial. For instance, you search for a somekind review of a product, or whatever you are looking for, and now Google shows you only Amazon, eBay, Etsy and other retailers, or websites that are selling those goods or services. I mean, there is no chance to beat those monsters, all you have to do is reinvent the wheel, otherwise start looking for other hobbies.

[carlweitz]

Oh, yes, i am in Amazon affiliate marketing have home improvement, gardening tools, skincare products and pets niche sites. All are down for about 80%. I see keywords like: dog house, cheap earphones, eye makeup tool, etc. are now swapped with lots of e-commerce websites. It's a matter of time when other keywords will be in favour for big companies. You have to realize, crisis is coming and all these companies have to prepare for it. Or maybe I am wrong and the sun will shine in the end of the tunnel :)

[Lisa01]

But why are all the websites affected, that’s the question.

[Alex_1729]

I lost all the keywords from all 3 of my websites. Even the images don’t appear on SERPs now. I don’t know what to do.

I'm in a similar spot. While I haven't lost all my traffic (just about 50%) I did lost almost all of my snippets, and they keep dropping. Just this morning I noticed I've lost a few more. What I found out is that review sites are affected, multi-niche sites are affected, and seems like sites with posts with a lot of subheadings are affected. How common this is I don't know, but this is exactly how my main site is, and I've also been affected so it could be true. Perhaps Google is penalizing us for exploiting SEO by being in this "gray area". I don't know.

What can we do? I can diversify. You already have 3 sites so I'm not sure, but if I had 3 sites I would wait it out and see this experiment through. Because if you change something and the traffic comes back, will it be because you've made some changes or because Google reverted, or some other reason.

[Lisa01]

I don’t think anything will change till the next update and that’s 6 months away. Google is being cruel now

[ne0h]

I am a long time reader. This is my first post here. I have 3 sites, one of them is 10+ yrs old. Last week update is the worst I have seen so far. Traffic is down 70 to 80% . It happened suddenly.

At this stage it is devastating. My earnings reduced from 100$ per day to 20$ on an average.

It's so unfortunate that, one company is controlling everything and bots, spam sites, scrapper sites are winning.

I have survived a lot of G updates over the years. Usually my sites backs up within a week. That's what happened in the past. But this time, days are passing by and there are no recovery at all. Perhaps there will not be any recovery.

There is no point to create authentic articles by hours of research. It's all waste.

[Jori]

@renatovieira I'm on the same boat. +20% of traffic (oh the joy...) but -20% of adsense. CPM down, down down... how can it be?
Maybe the crisis is killing advertisment budgets?

[MayankParmar]

Indexing issues right now, anyone?

[MrSnuts]

@Jori & @renatovieira - this is interesting. Of course there might be an economical explanation, but the synchronicity of events would still be odd.
So, what about this theory: Assumed, the changed rankings were (unintentionally, of course!) favoring sites using adsense, wouldn't that lead to more ad impressions total and thus a reduction of CPM, since that's auction-based?

@carlweitz
thanks for the neat examples of how keywords shift from informational to ecommerce. There's probably quite a lot of content around dog houses, ranging from "how to build your dog a smart home" (forums) to "look, my dog Weazle in his new doghouse" (socia media), "find the best dog house below $1000" (product review / comparison site) to "buy a super dog house here" (ecommerce).
I'm no dog owner, but I'd think if dogs were my passion, I might be looking for information rather more often then wanting to buy another doghouse, but the trend seems to be that google narrows its scope. That is somehow scary if you think it thru.

[carlweitz]

@MrSnuts
Hi, there! Sadly, but this is reality and my concern is that what we see now as Google "Update" is simply a test before they launch their own "amazon" .
Here is a proof of my theory, as you can see, all products will be purchasable:
[support.google.com...]
So, IMHO, get ready to rumble, as we are down forever and ever, ever, ever.

[RedBar]

@Alex_1729

I think you're misunderstanding me a bit. I have absolutely nothing against WP, I used it once myself about 12 years ago for a small project and one of my best friends took my reccommendation to use WP for his extremely popular blog, it looks great and worls very well.

They just don't want to learn code, or want to spend time on other things.

Absolutely and I couldn't agree more however here comes a conspiracy theory. If you were G and wanted to promote / demote / penalise / reward a multitude of websites at one stroke, what could be an easy way to do it? All those millions of sites using half a dozen popular CMS could be affected extremely easily since the vast majority of those sites use a standardised system whereas those of us who use a less common CMS or hand-coded one would be affected much less or not at all.

I'm not at all saying that could or would ever happen but who would have thought that Enron and Bernie Madoff could occur.

[RedBar]

@christianz

Sorry, I missed your post.

CMS choice (or choice of not using any popular CMS) should be irrelevant for ranking

Agreed but this is where hand-crafted knowledge can come in as opposed to the standardised way.

I don't think I'm that unusual in this but I actually enjoy hand-coding and experimenting with what I create ... or completely destroy as has happened on several occasions in the past!

As javelin pointed out above it is the sheer bulkiness and code bloat that I detest but I do completely understand that bloat is there to try and stop the non-coders of breaking the darned thing:-)

[malkhaldi]

@MayankParmar + Me too

[ichthyous]

This morning is the first morning since the update that traffic seemed to return to normal...then at 11am sharp it just vanished. It's now almost 3pm and no traffic since 11am. I do believe that this "update" is just a further consolidation of Google's stranglehold on the flow of traffic. Instead of 2 days per week, then three days per week...now every day ~10am-12pm the English language traffic vanishes for hours.

[ibb.co ]

USA and UK traffic are better than earlier in the week, but still tepid...

[vphoner]

The last couple of months have been terrible....lower and lower keyword hits. Was in the thousands at my peak 5 years ago. Then only 1 thousand, then went to 200 a few months ago, now today less than 100 keyword hits, this happened rather suddenly recently. I have an established medium sized site 15 years old. I just can't believe the devastation. Some keywords I still rank #1 or #2, but the volumes are way down. Get nothing from Bing/Yahoo anymore, it went away suddenly, Google was the last gasp. I guess I can only hope that they return the traffic, because I am clueless at this point what to do. I did notice 4 ads at the top of the results, not sure if that has changed. I think if you are not a large corporation or newspaper with great links, you have no chance on Google anymore. Those days are over. Glad I got some while the internet was young.

[BigKat]

Pretty much a steady supply of garbage traffic out of Google, and this core update hasn't changed that. Hopefully the rumors about an Apple search engine prove true as the high applebot activity I'm seeing would support. TBH, I'm tired of even talking about Google which is why I don't post often. While Google's core updates tend to core out us small businesses, we can at least hope the core from an Apple will give us hope for a better and more inclusive digital economy instead of the Amazon pages Google rams down our throats.

[vphoner]

Anyone know what "Page experience signals for mobile" is exactly. Almost all of my pages have suddenly become a bad page experience for mobile. Why all of the sudden? And with even more of a drop in traffic to almost nothing. Really getting tired of this. Its been terrible for quite a while but 2022 is the nail in the coffin.

[MayankParmar]

@malkhaldi Yeah, still having indexing issues.

[javelin]

For Friday I am above average in traffic but nothing stellar. Still reaching across other engines as well albeit a little lower with those like Bing today.

Those having trouble with indexing is GSC throwing them into the "excluded crawled but not indexed" or the "discovered but not indexed" categories? Here I am having no trouble with the index and have had pages increase.

A drop in indexed pages could be related to page content or overall site / content associated ranking.

[javelin]

I missed this post

Anyone know what "Page experience signals for mobile" is exactly. Almost all of my pages have suddenly become a bad page experience for mobile. Why all of the sudden? And with even more of a drop in traffic to almost nothing. Really getting tired of this. Its been terrible for quite a while but 2022 is the nail in the coffin.

If you go to the GSC overview section you can see both desktop and mobile with a percentage to both. Are both bad or is it just mobile?

If it is just mobile then the site is not configured as being responsive. It could be images, buttons, or other factors also playing into that. Small, lightweight, and fast with a clean layout is needed.

If using something like Wordpress most themes come mobile ready. If hand coding you will need to play with css keeping it light and ditch the flash.

Not all browsers will report on these metrics. It will depend on if they have opted into reporting.

[vphoner]

Javelin....Its only the mobile. The desktop is showing fine. It shows almost all of my pages as mobile friendly in the Mobile Friendly section of Google Console, but not in this page experience thing. It must be something else they are looking for. I can see a chart and it was ok a few months back, then went to near zero, then back up to normal, and then its been low to near zero pages having "page experience" for the last several months. Flip flopped for a while until settling in.

[javelin]

@vphoner ahh okay there are different things that can impact that beyond the mere mobile friendly part of the picture. There was an update last June that altered how Google sees page experience. I will give a google help url here [developers.google.com ]

If this has started since last June then youve been riding out the months wounded without finding what it is that Google or users do not like. If its more recent then look for any changes you made. This one can be hard to diagnose from here without seeing things so follow the info close and take a look at what you have.

[malkhaldi]

@MayankParmar + No everything is Ok Now

[RedBar]

I am now seeing movement in the G.com SERPs for my widget keyword terms, the lesser kewords so far do not seem to be affected, Friday's traffic was down 53%.

1. Pinterest has definitely seen big gains, in fact I have had one #1 keyword demoted to #2 by an absolutelu awful and irrelevant company Pinterest post from 2013 that has appeared from nowhere. The image is from the company's site that does not rank anywhere whatsoever however is deemed worthy of this rank.

2. The largest USA bulk importer has been firmly placed at #1 for the big ketword terms with one of its major custoners, Home Depot, at #2.

3. For the majority of my big keyword terms US companies have been promoted and non-USA companies have been demoted to at least the second page but mostly the third page and downwards.

This looks very similar to what we had a couple of years or so ago, is anyone else seeng similar in their widget world?

[longjohnbronze]

@MrSnuts: "So, what about this theory: Assumed, the changed rankings were (unintentionally, of course!) favoring sites using adsense, wouldn't that lead to more ad impressions total and thus a reduction of CPM, since that's auction-based?"

What about people who posted in the thread that they lost traffic - are you also running AdSense?

[RedBar]

So, what about this theory: Assumed, the changed rankings were (unintentionally, of course!) favoring sites using adsense,

This idea has been floated several times over the past 18+ years since the inception of AdSense in 2003 and as a former high earner (UPS no less) with AdSense and one who removed AdSense about 5 years ago, honestly I can't remember when, owing to not making the monthly minimum, I never saw my rankings affected either with or without AdSense.

My earnings' loss was primarily two-fold, a CTR that dropped from 7+% to sub 1% combined with a massive reduction in overall traffic mostly stemming back to G's grand image theft.

Most publishers' traffic reductions are mostly simply G's advertising intrusions strewn all over the first page and if one has high mobile traffic, say 70+%, I wonder how many of those visitors ever, ever, ever see a genuine organic listing?

Google is a traditional classfied advertising board with occasional artcles (us) inserted, nothing less.

[samwest]

The "keep 'em poor" update is working well. Breaking new records of low traffic and income...yet still at #1 and #2 organic positions. Yay for Google and their awesome SERP planning and AI execution teams!