The May 2022 Google Core Update was a doozy, and not something that should be taken lightly.
Many SEO professionals around the world have been impacted by this update, and some have lost significant traffic (seemingly overnight).
As usual, we have been scouring the web for information leading to particular insights about this update, and here we are.
These are insights from around the web from SEO professionals just like you.
From social media to discussion forums, everyone is talking about it.
So what are they saying?
Possible focus on AI Content
One trend that we have noticed involves a focus from Google on AI content. Some webmasters who use AI content exclusively apparently saw their sites obliterated almost overnight.
This is a little bit loose of an interpretation because many who use AI content are reporting significant gains.
We believe that there is too much speculation in terms of how Google is able to distinguish between AI and human-written content.
Much of this speculation can be harmful because people who are newer to the industry could potentially wind up with the wrong idea of how Google search actually works.
Insanely Low CPC (Cost Per Click)
Some SEO professionals have commented that there is a previously-unseen, insanely low cost per click that is happening now, which wasn’t happening before.
However, others are noticing the opposite, with CPC being higher than normal and they were even maintaining stability.
The thing about core updates is that despite their threat to everyone, there are still ways you can recover, as we have reported on in the past.
Not All That Much to Pinpoint
Aside from that, there isn’t all that much one can assess from discussions besides this. It just seems to be one of your run-of-the-mill core updates.
In which case, site quality plays a major role.
That means: cleaning up your 404 errors, making sure that you have all the right canonicals in place, that you don’t have errant redirects, and everything else that you could potentially need to correct in this regard.
Google Core Update Forum Discussions
Interestingly our UK hotel / pub site traffic is definitely well above usual Sunday, Monday and Tuesday aveages BUT how much this has to do with the Jubilee celebrations later this week I obviously have no idea other than the live music calendar page being well-visited.
In short, my traffic had a good increase and my earnings evaporated…
Is anyone else here noticing an insanely low CPC these past 45 days?
Image in question:
The traffic you guys see dropping on English only sites is interesting. Keep us updated when and if you see it hitting other languages.
My traffic is near back to normal after yesterday. So… Thurs, Fri was great, Sat was above average, Sunday dropped like a rock and Monday began recovery.
It is very strange because we moved up several places and gained a lot of #1 spots.
I guess they reactivated the “buying intend” filter again.
My UK hotel / pub site finished the month at 112.3% with just its highest of 2022. For the year so far it is 108.5% therefore if this continues an adjustment may be required. Most of my other sites (local) with much lower traffic levels were around their normal levels but I do have a specific one that has almost died even though it ranks well in the UK SERPs.
What kind of UGC do you have, product reviews, forum-style or something else?
I have zero UGC on my site…could this be a dialing up of the linkspam algo? My most important and linked to content pages are getting hit the hardest.
My youngest site up dramatically today – up 50% WoW, but it’s small and data is not very meaningful. It has few real human backlinks but has accumulated bunch of fake ones (as all sites do as they age).
So far looks like its all about who has more (fake) links. No ranking intelligence beyond that.
I have long-wondered whether G sees general forums as a major competitor to its search? Over the years many general forums have closed thanks to less traffic but also being unable to monetise them enough simply to pay simple costs. I saw that in my industry, a really popular forum used by many thousands a week couldn’t justify its “pro” fees.
I believe there are many reasons why google (and sadly a lot of its users) have abandoned forums in the past decade, I don’t think google took a it as a competitive thing tho.
IMO the reason will rather be among the following:
- UGC tends to be of mixed quality (just think spelling errors, lack of proper source referencing, lack of fancy images…),
- the authors appearing as “RedBar” or “MrSnuts” can’t be technically “trusted” as asked for in EAT,
- most forums didn’t make the change to mobile well (mobile is con-longtext anyhow) and
- most forum operators missed the user interface design changes that came about (look around here… notice something?).
- UGC has a high risk of being fraudulent as far as copyrights are concerned, people used to grab & paste all kinds of text & images, while deeplinking from your forum bb-code to images started to be seen as a bad signal from some point on (too many sources to connect to, slow loading times, background traffics data privacy issues)
Its a sad evolution that UGC has been boiled down to unstructured social media groups, trustworthy influencers (*cough*) and product reviews, but that’s what it is now.
There was/is a lot of unique and very informative content to be found in those forums, and its sad to see that can’t be found via google any longer.
Even a ranting discussion on some ugly looking forum might have included just the piece of information you were looking for – instead you are looking at “people also asked” today.
What still ranks even tho its UGC are the super strictly-managed Q&A sites like StackOverflow, where an internal rating system & fierce moderation keeps the quality of content up.
Concerning your question about direct traffic, depending on your tracking it might be that people who choose “open link in new tab” on google are counted as direct traffic, since its not the very same browser window that was previously filled by google. That might explain your observation of direct following organics patterns, too.
I’m currently seeing a slight <5% recovery on the EN site, no impact on the non-EN domains so far.
