Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Several times per year, we make substantial improvements to our overall ranking processes,
which we refer to as core updates. Core
updates are designed to increase the overall relevancy of our search results and
make them more helpful and useful
for everyone. Today, we’re releasing our May 2022 core update. It will take about 1-2 weeks to
fully roll out.
Core updates are changes we make to improve Search overall and keep pace with the changing nature
of the web. While nothing in a core update is specific to any particular site, these updates may
produce some noticeable changes to how sites perform, which we’ve noted in previous guidance on
what site owners should know about core updates:
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.
We’ll update this blog post again to confirm that the rollout of the May 2022 core update is
complete. If you have any feedback about the May 2022 core update, you can post in this
forum thread.