Since May 16, 2022, several of our major affiliate sites in eCommerce niches have seen traffic drop up to 80%.

There were also several announcements on SEO resources:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-33430.html

https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5063031.htm

Also, some supervisors of major U.S. stores that participate in affiliate programs have written to me and also noticed a big drop in traffic from webmasters. What does it say – the update has hit affiliate sites hard.

Later the update was confirmed by Google itself: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/05/may-2022-core-update

Unusual quote from Google:

We confirm broad core updates because they typically produce some widely notable effects. Some sites may note drops or gains during them. We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things. Moreover, there might not be anything to fix at all.

There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor been subjected to manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those guidelines. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better.

The plan is to wait a couple of weeks for new information from Google when the update is fully completed and then decide what to do next.