Is your Site Hit by the May 2022 Core Update?
Google rolled out its first major algorithm update of the year on May 25.Historically, we waited several days for the impact to take form and then monitored its effect. Within 24 hours after the announcement, the impact was felt quickly and data tracking providers saw trends, and were ready to report a fair amount of insights about it.
If you look at the SEMrush Sensor tool, the volatility tracker shows that the broad update already took effect several hours after the rollout. Mordy Oberstein of SEMRush opines that this rapid volatility is becoming a pattern especially with the most recent rollouts.
For example, in the May 2022 update, 17% of the new top ranked results in Google came from position 20 and beyond. RankRanger noticed the high volatility pattern too, as reported in their index tool. It tagged the Google desktop and mobile SERP fluctuations on May 26, a day after the announcement, both as “very high. ”It uses the Rank Risk Index to measure fluctuations for over 10,000 domains and keywords that it monitors on a daily basis.
Another data provider, SISTRIX, tracks changes in the SERPs following the May core update and released the top 20 winners and losers in this change. The retail industry benefited more from the update as it ranked Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Target at the top.
The SEO Community agrees that the recent update was more significant than the November 2021 core update, however bad its timing was. Of course, November is the month when sales start climbing and peak during the holidays. It was the busiest season for shopping, to the merriment of retail businesses. The May2022 core update struck at a better time, as it gives marketers opportunity to make adjustments to their optimisation efforts and reap their rewards in the most profitable quarter of the year.
For websites that were adversely impacted by a past core update, we already know the drill. While Google does not offer specific actions to take to recover your ranking, the search engine extraordinaire gave marketers questions to consider, any of which could have resulted in a hit:
● Does your site offer original content?
● Does your site provide in-depth, comprehensive discussion of a topic?
● Does your headline or page title provide a complete and helpful summary of your content?
● Is your content valuable enough to be cited by different websites orany print media like magazines or books?
● Is the content written by someone credible or someone who demonstrates proficiency in that topic?
● Is the content free from grammatical and style issues?
● Does the page have too many ads that distract readers away from your content?
● Does the content genuinely provide helpful content for the users, and do not mean to optimise only for the search engine?
● Does the page render well across mobile devices?
Any marketer with enough experience with‒ and battle scars from‒ these pesky algorithm updates knows that it’s difficult to isolate factors for why your site was negatively impacted. Harder still is to quickly recover from it and reinstate your site’s ranking in the search results. We can glean from the data above that if your site has been adversely affected by a core update, it means that your site has outstanding quality issues that need to be addressed.
If your site was hit by the May 2022 update, we recommend that you stop nit-picking and start zooming out to see if, overall, your website is compliant to BOTH search engines and the needs of the users who visit it. You can start mapping out improvements (structural and content-wise) from there.
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