Several times per year, we make significant improvements to our overall ranking methods, which we refer to as core updates. Core updates are designed to improve 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 almost 1-2 weeks to fully proceed.
Core updates are changes we make to enhance Search overall and keep pace with the changing nature of the web. While nobody is a core update is specific to any particular site, these updates may deliver some prominent changes to how sites complete, 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 increases during them. We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we desire to ensure they don’t try to fix the sinful things. Moreover, there might not be anything to fix at all.
There’s nothing incorrect with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor been subjected to manual or algorithmic action, as can transpire to pages that do violate those guidelines. 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 also 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 it in this forum thread. Contact Us .