Just over 45 days have passed since Google released its May 2022 broad core update. Google's Core updates are designed to increase the overall relevancy of search results and make them more helpful and useful for everyone.

Regardless of your rank and organic traffic, you're bound to reap the rewards of maintaining an optimized user experience on both the front and back end of your websites.

Here's a quick overview of what we've been seeing from a rank perspective.

Winners and Losers

Overall, there was a small decrease in the number of keywords ranking in the top 10 positions on Google. However, when looking at the data more closely, it appears that this may be due to some sites losing rankings for very competitive keywords, while others gained rankings for less competitive keywords.

Some of the biggest losers in the update appear to be websites in the news and media industry, as well as e-commerce sites. It's possible that Google is favoring more authoritative websites in these industries with this update.

On the other hand, we've seen some big winners in the update as well. Websites in the travel and hospitality industry appear to have made significant gains, as well as some health and fitness websites. It's possible that Google is favoring these types of websites because they are considered essential businesses.

Overall, Omaha Media Group's clients were not negatively affected by this core update, this is because of your strategic approach to content and maintaining a healthy user experience on both ends of your website. We did, however, have a few clients whose ranks dipped a bit, at first, but now have recovered and then some past the 30-day mark. This is to be expected.

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 we 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 Google's 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 Google's systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better.

Summary

Overall, it's still too early to tell what Google's exact intentions were with this update. However, it seems clear that they wanted to shake things up a bit and give some breathing room to newer, less established websites. Only time will tell how long these changes will last and what impact they'll have on the SEO landscape.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out so we can help digest and answer them.