Google Core Update September 2022. Analysis, Winners and Losers

Steve Paine

(Author)

Published: 19.09.2022

In this article, we’ll show the impact, present initial analysis and winners/losers of the Core Update September 2022. A summary of the key points:

• Google has been officially rolling out a new core update since September 12th. These algorithm updates affect the rankings of many domains as improvements are made to the core of the search engine.
• It will take two weeks for the update to be fully rolled out. However, we are already seeing the first trends and developments in the Google search results.
• We have been able to measure the first effects in our visibility data since Thursday (September 15th). Our live data confirms these trends with updates every five minutes.

To check the effects of the update for any domain, log in to SISTRIX now or create a free test account . We will update this blog post as new data and numbers become available. If you would like to be notified of future algorithm updates by email, sign up for our newsletter.

Google Core Update September 2022 announcement

Core Update is the label that Google gives to algorithm updates that make fundamental changes to the way the search engine organises its search results pages.

Experience has shown that it takes around two weeks for a core update to be fully rolled out to Google’s global data centres and for the final status of the changes in the visibility of domains to be see

However, even after the first few days, there are often clear tendencies that continue across the following days, and do not reverse. As we are already seeing clear changes in the visibility index for some domains, here are our first findings.

How to tell if a domain has been affected by the Core Update

To determine if your, or any domain has been affected by this Core Update, check the daily visibility data for that domain in SISTRIX. Look specifically at changes from the period starting from the 15th September. Strong changes in the Visibility Index mean that the cause is most likely due to this Core Update. Here’s an example.

It is important to keep in mind that change can be both positive and negative . In the screenshot above, the visibility went down, but there can also be exactly the opposite effect.

Same old suspects : Dictionaries Big Losers (and Winners)

A constant of all core updates are the large fluctuations in the visibility of dictionaries and similar sites: for some these updates go up, for others down.

This update hit www.yourdictionary.com particularly hard. The website, which uses “current and reputable websites” as sources, has given up a lot of visibility.

If you take the next step and look at the keywords for which the domain has lost rankings, you see important terms that the site has lost from page 1 of the search results.

While Google now very accurately recognizes the search intention behind the search for the vast majority of keywords and delivers corresponding websites (or a mixture) among the first ten organic results, this is very, very difficult with such generic, meaningless keywords.

In the end this is not really a problem for Google, as the search engine simply displays a dictionary result above the organic search results for these keywords.

Sept 2022 Core Update Winners and Losers examples. (US data)

Using the data from USA, there are plenty of candidates in the percentage winners list. We’ve removed some obvious hacked sites and a few for whom +/- 40% appears to be business as usual.

Where there are winners, there are also losers. Here’s the current top 20 losing domains. (Data from SISTRIX, 19th Sept 2022.)

Sept 2022 Core Update Winners and Losers. (UK data)

Updated on the 20th September, here are the biggest examples of winners and losers from UK search data.

Here are the current top 20 losing domains. (Data from SISTRIX, 20th Sept 2022.)

This post will be updated regularly throughout the period of the September 2022 Core Update.