Google has rolled out the latest Core Search Update for 2022

Google has just released the first significant update to its core algorithm for the year 2022. Danny Sullivan, the company’s Public Liaison for Search made the announcement in a blog post; noting that the “May 2022 core update” will take about 1-2 weeks to fully roll out.

The last core update occurred in November 2021, which is over 6 months ago. Google stated, “today, we’re releasing our May 2022 core update. It will take about 1-2 weeks to fully roll out.”

As explained by Google, “Core updates are changes we make to improve Search overall and keep pace with the changing nature of the web.” The new Core update for Search will change the way some sites are listed in Search results pages. Digital content managers and webmasters are therefore advised to keep an eye on their Google rankings over the next few weeks.

The question is, therefore, what has changed?

Well, Google didn’t mention in exact terms what is being updated. The Blog post only noted that the updates “may produce some noticeable changes to how sites perform”. “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,” the company stated.

What you should do if your site get hit by the Google core update

If you are negatively affected by a core update, Google has already provided suggestions for what to consider. There are no specific recovery steps, and a drop in rankings may not indicate anything is wrong with your web pages. The company also provided a list of questions to consider. It did mentioned that there is a period of recovery time between core updates, but that the most significant change would occur after the next core update.

Since May 16 up until this week, the SEO community has been observing signs of a possible Google algorithm update. Google has not confirmed these rumors as of yet. Before launch, there was a very good chance that any fluctuation was unrelated to those rumors. Maybe Google was doing some testing with this major update. In response to this, Google said, “when we announce core updates, we start the roll-out at that point, not beforehand.”

If you’re curious about what’s changed, you can follow the discussion in this forum thread.