Google’s May 2020 Core Update is live “SEO TiP May 5th 2020”

Algorithm Updates

Google’s May 2020 Core Update is live

This week Google announced that they have pushed out another core update. As usual, they did not give us specifics but linked to their post that advises on what webmasters should know about core updates.

While I am have seen several possible small updates in the last few months, our last core update happened four months ago in January of 2020.

Since Google has started to tell us when they have released a significant update, we have found that in general, we don’t tend to see much change in website traffic until 24-48 hours after the update. Sure enough, this was the case this time. The announcement was made on May 4. Starting May 5, we have several clients seeing beautiful increases in traffic coming from Google.

Google Announcements

Google Search Console now supports SpecialAnnouncement structured data

Last month Google announced a feature to display COVID-19 related announcements. Now, with support for SpecialAnnouncements, site owners will be able to see errors, warnings and valid pages markups.

On top of that, once you fix an issue and use the report to validate it, the new feature will trigger Google to recrawl the affected page. Site owners will also be able to see the impact of SpecialAnnouncements markup.

SEO Tips

Gary Illyes talks about the importance of page speed

On Twitter last week, Gary Illyes commented on site speed saying that “Ranking wise, it’s a teeny tiny factor, very similar to https ranking boost”. So a fast site may help your rankings, but it is also a lot more likely to help improve things like your conversions and not frustrate your visitors — which are very legitimate reasons to have a speedy site.

Get a Google Sheets tip a day, for 30 days

This is a cool project to follow from the folks over at BrainLabs. They are releasing a Google Sheets pro-tip a day for 30 days. At the time of writing we are on day 6 of 30, and the tips are pretty good so far!