Google’s May Core Update Isn’t Done: What June SERP Volatility Means for SEO

All right, SEO friends. Some people are reporting that last month's May core algorithm update is still being fine-tuned, even though technically it should have ended. On this episode of the show, I'm going to share what the streets are saying about the volatility that is still going on in the search engine results pages. I'm going to give my take, and we're just going to make sense of what's happening so there is less guessing. Search Engine Roundtable put out this article, Google search ranking volatility this week. Chatter around volatility spiked the last couple of days. Here are some of the things that people are saying. Pages with branded items got hit very hard. Shops with non-branded items got pushed. Number one to number five are big seller platforms, media, market, auto, idealo. Low content rules over good content. That's so subjective. Everyone thinks that bad content is being pushed. It's more so user signals are being pushed, site signals are being pushed. Google does not evaluate content quality. It can't. Traffic comes in surges, 2 hours, and then 1 to 3 hours with traffic, only bots. Overall quality has tanked to an all-time low. Somebody else said, "EU traffic is really crashing since yesterday." Another person, "I'm seeing with my shop, too. Although we had a good day for a change the day before yesterday, things are running very poorly again." Somebody else, "My global site for the last few days has been consistently down 50%. Basically, there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, doubt that webmasters are sharing. Here's one that's somewhat good. Anyone seeing an increase in visibility / traffic? I know it's ironic to post such a question under such a topic in the last 16 hours. I have a domain that was hit by last year's spam update, probably due to too many pages in the index, which seemed to bounce back for some reason. It's not fake traffic, it's real, and looks like I'm regaining some of the lost keywords." That's great. Somebody else, "Something is definitely going on and has been since mid-May. It has gotten worse in the past few days." So, what's crazy about the May core algorithm update is it's one of the biggest core algorithm updates we've seen in a while because its effects were felt well before the update started. People were messaging me well before the update was announced asking, "Is there an update? Is there an update? Is there an update?" And it was happening around the time that Google made its big Google I/O announcement. Then the update was announced, but it seems like the effects of the May core algorithm update continue. So, we're going to talk about what's being deprioritized and then what's being prioritized. It seems that aggregated or derivative content, especially content that doesn't give a satisfactory deep answer or that's just completely generic information like you will get with a lot of AI-generated pages, is being deprioritized. Thin content can be fine. A lot of people throw around the term thin content, content that doesn't give a rich enough answer. But some answers, they don't have to be super deep. Other answers, you would expect something deep and when you don't get that, that's when it is a problem. Google is also warning against commodity content as we've been talking about on this show. Google even has a section on creating non-commodity content in its Google Search Central guidelines. So, commodity content would be 2024 kitchen trends you need to see. Non-commodity content would be marble versus grape juice, why I refuse to install stone for a family of five. It's a lot more firsthand. Firsthand experience seems to be getting prioritized. So, surprisingly with the May update extending to now, it seems actually that forums and Q&A sites like Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange are losing visibility. Alida Solis shared this. This is the first core update in which previously boosted hidden gems content actually saw a broad pullback. A lot of people have actually been sharing this something else, another pattern. A lot of people have been sharing that aggregators that are not the canonical reference are getting deprioritized while sources that are the canonical reference, not like canonical with rel canonical, but literally it's the reference that other sites are linking to or citing, those ones are getting prioritized even more than normal. Whereas the aggregators, which don't have as much new information, are getting deprioritized. But it's important to say that this could also be user signals. More and more people are writing their content with AI. AI is just citing other people's articles and posts and YouTube videos and Reddit posts. It's less likely to be new information and that could have worse user signals. More people clicking back to the search results, less compelling page titles. But it seems that for now aggregators are facing a decline. And this one was big. In the UK, UK specific e-commerce domains like amazon.co.uk or ebay.co.uk are gaining while US.com versions are losing over 50% of visibility. Basically, if you are a local domain and there is competition in foreign markets that you're trying to rank in, it could be more difficult. So either really niche down with your top-level domain or just use a .com, but if you're a big local brand, consider keeping your local top-level domain and creating a new .com entity with its own team. And there was a lot of volatility and continues to be a lot of volatility in YMYL your money, your life niches. Gagan Goel posted on X, "The May 2026 core update boosted Trustpilot to the moon for casino queries." And then Glenn Gabe responded to this and said, "There is some serious volatility in the gambling niche with the May 2026 broad core update. Definitely a hyper YMYL category, so it can see major volatility during major updates." And a lot of people in the comments for Glenn Gabe's post said, "YMYL niches always get hit the hardest? Gambling, finance, health, Google does not play around with those categories during core updates." But, what we're seeing with this one is that the intent behind queries in YMYL is being more fine-tuned. So, Google is adjusting its algorithm to really figure out the intent behind queries in the YMYL space. But, that shouldn't sound scary because optimizing for search intent has always been a best practice. A lot of people just don't want to put in the thought to doing that. I shared this a few episodes ago, an easy way to better address search intent before you start writing any SEO content, answer these questions. Write them yourself, don't have AI do this, write it yourself. Write, "Who is searching your primary keyword? What do they want? What are they looking to achieve?" If you answer that yourself, you will create content that better addresses search intent, and you will be more likely to not even target keywords that your brand doesn't satisfy. So, what's being prioritized? And honestly, I think this is good news for a lot of folks. We're seeing again, the sites that actually are getting referenced, these are getting prioritized more. And so, if you're making non-commodity content with more first-hand experience, you're just in general more likely to get prioritized. First-hand, expert-driven, original content, local market relevance, as we've been saying on the show, niche down, that is getting prioritized. There's also some chatter that pages with more unique media is actually getting prioritized. And we talked about this on episode 1056 of this podcast, "Backlinks Aren't Enough, How to Win Competitive SEO." Actually make custom images for pages that better address search intent. Make images completely relevant to your target keyword. If you're trying to win at SEO, that is a really good practice. Make it so searchers don't even have to start reading the copy. Just the H1 and then look at the image to understand what your page is about, and then they can keep going deeper. So, that's what we're seeing. Yes, there's volatility, but for those who are really doing searcher-first SEO, you will have a much better time. One more thing is don't do a lot of templated content where all of your pages and posts look the same. Unless it's programmatic SEO, but if you have a blog or something, you don't want and we talked about this on yesterday's episode of the show, Blogging Isn't Dead: How Niche Blogs Still Make Money with SEO, episode 1074. Avoid having all of your blog posts targeting the same keywords. Like, you don't want to have 20 best X for Y listicles directly after each other. And similarly, you don't want your bottom-of-funnel SEO landing pages to all target the same-sounding keywords. And the last thing that I'll say, I think a lot of us forget this. I made an image for this and I put it on X. Through the volatility, keep calm and build links, and get brand mentions and branded searches and optimize for a natural backlink profile. If you want to learn SEO that is less likely to be affected by major volatility, my compact keywords SEO landing pages, the type of pages that I teach how to make in my SEO course compact keywords, the types of queries that I recommend going after where I share how to find these queries, how to structure your site for these queries and these pages, over the last couple of years, I have seen nothing but stability or even increases for this type of content. The course gives examples in every niche. There is Google Doc templates, Google Sheet templates, written portions, visual templates, many videos. So much is in this course. If you haven't checked it out yet, you're going to love it. That is at compactkeywords.com. I spent a year you're it and it is updated several times a month. And that's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This episode 1075 of The AdWords Show. I am recording this episode outside. Feeling great. It is so beautiful. I have a nice Americano to my side. I hope your rankings are stable or better yet going up. And you know what? If they're not now, they will be soon. Let's all get into this with some amazing, incredible SEO. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.