Google September 2022 Broad Core Update Is Live – What We Are Seeing Now
Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the year, the September 2022 broad core update. It started on September 12, 2022 at about 11:25 am ET and can take about two weeks to roll out.
This update followed the completion of the?Google helpful content update?that?finished?on Friday, September 9th. I am surprised, I was kind of told that following the helpful content update we would be getting the?fifth product reviews update?- but all is good, we got a core update instead.
So far we are seeing that this core update is already picking up steam and causing a lot of widespread volatility. Both the early chatter within the SEO community are showing this and also the Google tracking tools. Some are showing 20-60% drops in traffic since this began rolling out. It is too soon to be certain but I wanted to share what we’ve seen so far.
Google September 2022 Broad Core Update Quick Facts
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
- Name:?Google September 2022 Broad Core Update
- Launched:?September 12, 2022 at around 11:25 pm ET
- Rollout:?It will take about one to two weeks to roll out
- Targets:?It looks at all types of content
- Penalty:?It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
- Global:?This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
- Impact:?Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but so far, this seems to be a typical core update that reaches wide and the impact is fast.
- Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
- Recover:?If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with?Google’s core update advice.
- Refreshes:?Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those?unconfirmed Google updates.
Here is the tweet announcing this which links to the page that says “September 12, 2022 – Released the September 2022 core update. The rollout could take 2 weeks to complete.”
Will This Be A Big Update
Time will tell but core updates tend to be noticeable and SEOs do generally see widespread changes with these updates. Plus Danny Sullivan kind of hinted that we might see changes with the next core update, as Glenn Gabe reminded us below. But not because the helpful content update and core updates are related, they are not. More because the scores together might tip some scales for some, if they have issues with both separate ranking systems…
Previous Broad Core Updates
This will take a couple of weeks to roll out and it has been about four months since the last update, which was last the?May 2022 core update?on May 25, 2022. Prior to that was the?November 2021 core update?on November 17th through?November 30th. The previous core updates prior to the November update was the?July 2021?and then a month prior to that with the?June core update. The one before that was 6 months before the June update, on December 3, 2020 named the?December 2020 core update. Before that was 7 month gap where on May 4, 2020, the?May 2020 core update. The one prior to that was on January 13, 2020, the?January 2020 core update?and the one before that was on September 24, 2019, the?September 2019 core update. Oh, before that was on June 3, 2019, the?June 2019 core update?and I can go on and on.