The February 2022 page experience update for desktop ran from 22 February to 3 March 2022, taking 9 days. It extended to desktop the signals that had applied to mobile since 2021, with one deliberate omission: mobile friendliness obviously did not carry over. Nine days against 79 for the mobile version, and a correspondingly quieter effect.
What changed and what did not
The same experience signals now applied to desktop results: Core Web Vitals, HTTPS and the absence of intrusive interstitials. Mobile friendliness was dropped from the desktop calculation for obvious reasons.
Nothing else changed. The weighting remained a tie-breaker, and Google repeated the same guidance it had given for mobile: great page experience does not override having great content.
Who this was relevant to
Sites with a materially desktop-weighted audience, which by 2022 meant a fairly narrow set: B2B software, professional services, developer tools, enterprise procurement and certain financial research. For a consumer site running 70 percent mobile traffic, a desktop-only experience signal was close to irrelevant.
- Check your device split before spending anything. Search Console segments by device, and if desktop is 15 percent of your traffic this update could not have caused a meaningful decline.
- Desktop and mobile Core Web Vitals differ. A site can pass on desktop and fail on mobile or the reverse, and they are measured separately.
- Nine days is a narrow window. A drop outside 22 February to 3 March 2022 almost certainly belongs to something else.
What else was running
Nothing else was confirmed in that window, which is unusual and makes attribution here cleaner than for most 2022 dates. The March 2022 product reviews update did not begin until 23 March, three weeks later.
So a desktop-heavy site that fell in late February 2022 has a genuinely plausible match. A mobile-heavy site that fell in the same window almost certainly has an unrelated cause, and the seven causes of a drop with no update is the better place to start.
Desktop-heavy B2B site with an unexplained 2022 drop?
Device split decides whether this update could even apply to you, and most audits never check it. Send your Search Console access and I will segment it properly.
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Traffic dropped around Feb 22, 2022?
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