What does a Google core update mean for you?

What is a Google Core Update?

A Google core update happens when Google makes significant and broad changes to its search engine algorithms and systems. These updates aim to improve the search experience for users, providing more relevant, useful, and trustworthy content. Core updates ensure Google keep up to paces changing, due to the nature of the web. Core updates are never specific to any particular site or pages.

How often do Google Core updates happen?

In most cases, core Google Search updates happen several times per year, usually every few months. Google tends to announce the updates a few days before or the day of, although some updates can take several days to roll out for users once released.

The Last Core Update

More recently Google released the May 2022 core update. It will take about 1-2 weeks to fully roll out. This update will make substantial improvements to Google’s overall ranking processes. This Core updates is designed to increase the overall relevancy of the search results and make them more helpful and useful for everyone.

Why is it important to keep an eye on Core Updates as a business?

Google confirm core updates because they typically produce some widely notable effects. Some sites including yours, may notice some drops or gains during the update period. If you notice your site experiencing many drops, Google know you will be looking for a fix, and Google want to ensure you personally don’t take action and end up fixing 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 guidelines nor been subjected to a manual or algorithmic action. As stated 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. These are all reasons to why it is important to know when the updates are occuring, so if you experience decreases in activity- then you know why. Google ask if you have any feedback about the May 2022 core update or updates in general, you can post in this forum thread.