The May 2020 Core Update is complete: here is what changed in the SERPs

It took about two weeks, as expected and announced: the May 2020 Core Update has completed its roll-out and is therefore fully operational and working. The official news was announced as usual by the Twitter account @searchliaision on the evening of May 18 and it is therefore time to take a general look at what has changed in the SERPs after this Google update.

May 2020 Core Update, severe impacts in SERP

In these two weeks the Google Serps have experienced great fluctuations, as we noted in our preliminary analysis of the update: all signals indicate that it was a major update, with a significant and transversal impact on many sectors and vertical sites.

Big sites and socials rewarded?

There have been controversies, another typical consequence of the updates, and many have complained because big brands and social networks seem to have been privileged; in particular, among the pages of Google results now emerge with even greater frequency sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Amazon, eBay and others that have little contents and many images.

Even more in detail, Roger Montti on Searchenginejournal reports an example of SERP dominated by a single site (even in spite of the promise of diversification and diversity change…): it is Etsy, which somehow seems associated with the handmade queries (handcrafted, handmade), to the point that Google US now places Etsy for almost all queries that contain the term handmade.

“It is as if the entity of Etsy was closely associated with the word handmade”, says the expert, who then reports some of these occurrences: handmade fishing flies, handmade socks and handmade bongos. This last query, in particular, has a SERP consisting of two Etsy results, two results from eBay and one each from Pinterest and Amazon.com.

Potential connection with the pandemic trends

Even Google Trends shows that Etsy has r