The introduction of Google was itself revolutionary. And later on, its algorithms continued to be revised to improve the customer experience and make them feel better. These updates completely changed the way Google ranked websites and search engine optimisation practices that abided by the protocols that these algorithms defined.
Let’s take a look at each update below.
Major Google Algorithm Updates
- Content Update
Launch: 12 April, 2023
Purpose: This review system update works on a group of algorithms that cumulatively produce search results. Its motto was to review and rank people-first content. It should provide insightful analysis and original research. The pieces written by experts or enthusiasts who know about it would be considered.
- Core Web Vitals
Launch: May, 2023
Purpose: This algorithm came with three main points to consider, which are First Input Display (FID), Largest Content Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Considering the FID, this algorithm measures the time from the very first point when a user interacts with a page to the time when the browser responds to the interaction. In other words, it’s related to avoiding or breaking up long tasks. The LCP encompasses any upload time from the previous page, connection time, redirect time, and time to the first byte. Simply put, it is the time when the LCP resource discovers the HTML files. And the CLS is a measuring point for the largest burst of layout shift scores by adding shift scores across layout shifts that do not happen in 500 milliseconds of user input. Here, layout shift refers to the sudden changes in the position of web elements from one rendered frame to the next. And, a burst of layout shift is measured when one or more individual layout shifts are notices quickly in succession, which is with less than 1 second between each shift or max of 5 seconds of the total window duration.
The fourth metric is also on the way, which will be completely implemented in 2024. It’s INP or Interaction with Next Paint. The only difference is that the user input should be 200 milliseconds or less for a fast and responsive experience.
- E.E.A.T (Helpful Content) Update
Launch: 5 December, 2022
Purpose: This update was completed by January 12 to roll out. With it, google started considering a helpful content system as a ranking factor. The helpful content is original and answers to customer’s pain points. For it, the search engine detects content with little value, low added value, or is otherwise not specific to people. All in all, the content should reflect experience (it’s in the context of first-hand or life-experience of the service or product provided), expertise (in the context of the content & its sources), authoritativeness (which is related to the reputation of the website), and trustworthiness (it’s regarding the accuracy, honesty, safety, and reliability of the information provided).
- Link Spam Update
Launch: 14 December, 2022
Purpose: This update started rolling out on 14 December and got over on January 12, 2023. It helped remove the impact of unnatural links on search results. Google used SpamBrain for it. By now, its AI was able to determine both buying links as well as sites used for passing outgoing links. It impacted sites in all languages.
- Passage Ranking
Launch: 10 February, 2021
Purpose: This new update was regarding ranking factors. However, it continued indexing pages and considering details about entire pages to align ranking. But, considering passages from pages, it became a new ranking factor.
- Known Victims Protection
Launch: 10 June, 2021
Purpose: This was aimed at restricting the reach of low-quality sites that engage in exploitative removal practices. I was introduced with a view to helping people who are dealing with extraordinary cases of repeated harassment. This update also worked on websites involved in predatory practices, like appearing people’s names on low-quality sites. Google automatically applies ranking protection to help them.
- Page Experience Update
Launch: 15 June, 2021
Purpose: It was to improve the web page experience for users. With these few questions, the search engine made it easy if the website was user-friendly.
- Does the website have good Core Web Vitals?
- Are pages secure?
- Does content appear well on mobile devices?
- Does it have an excessive amount of ads that distract users from exploring the main content?
- Do pages have intrusive interstitials?
- How easy is the navigation to reach out to the main content of pages?
- Is the page designed in such way that visitors can easily differentiate the main content from other web pages?
- Google Link Spam Algorithm
Launch: 26 July, 2021
Purpose: This was to eliminate link spam. The search engine clearly announced the fluctuation in the ranking of those sponsored, guest, and affiliate contents that were indulged in link spam. With this, it clearly indicated that within two weeks, the update would be completely live and implemented.
- Google Spam Update
Launch: 3 November, 2021
Purpose: With this update, Google introduced new guidelines for Webmaster, which impacted searches consistently. Its search essentials, such as web pages, images, videos, or other publicly available material, would be considered to appear on Google searches. The leading search engine worked on spam policies, which forced the behaviour and tactics that led to lower ranking to be eliminated. Google removed them from the results. This practice improved results.
- Broad Core Update
Launch: 17 November, 2021
Purpose: Through its Twitter account, Google announced the rollout of its Broad Core update, which started showing differences in web rankings. They either ranked up or down in searches. However, the algorithm did not target anything specific. And the downfall in ranking was not a penalty. Instead, those pages were reanalyzed and ranked down on the basis of the content being shared. And those pages won’t rank up until the next core update is routed. Moreover, the improvement in pages did not guarantee any recovery.
- Local Search Update
Launch: November, 2021
Purpose: The sole purpose of this update was to rebalance ranking factors for generating local research results. These factors were relevant and tell how the business matches the searched query. The second was distance, which was all about discovering how far the resulted business was located from the location where the term was used. And prominence is the third factor that tells how good the business is at meeting expectations.
Launch: December, 2021
Purpose: This update was released in the context of the product reviews. From April 2021 on, Google started giving importance to those websites that provided high-quality evidence, such as visuals, audios, or other links of real-time experiences with the product, to support users with authentic reviews. Also, it recommended links be provided to sellers so that readers can directly purchase from their merchants if it seems fine.
13. Google Core Update
Launch: May, 2020
Purpose: This was focused on the content, its relevancy, and its quality. Read more here.
14. Featured Snippet
Launch: 1 August, 2019
Purpose: After Valentine’s Day and Florida 2 updates, this algorithm was related to the research result via a concise summary or the most useful excerpt from a webpage that pops up at the top of the SERPs. It hides the accurate and concise response of a user’s query. One can check it in a special block so that the user can immediately reach out to the direct answer to the question he or she asked. It also includes a brief snippet with text, the page URL, and title.
Its next version was released as Featured Snippet De-Duplication on 22 January, 2020 wherein Google’s Danny Sullivan announced that the featured snippet would not be included in page 1 organic results. It impacted 100% of SERPs results.
15. BERT
Launch: October-December, 2019
Purpose: One of the biggest transformations in the history of Google, BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, was a new model called natural language processing, or NLP, introduced by Google in 2019. It helped the search engine better understand the context hidden in the words used by users. This model automatically started understanding the query or whatever is shared on the internet through complementary words. For example, it became capable of understanding if the user was asking about an apple that had been eaten or an electronic brand. Within these two months, this update was rolled out in these languages worldwide-Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified & Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian Malay (Brunei Darussalam & Malaysia), Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, and Vietnamese.
16. Halloween Update (Unconfirmed)
Launch: 31 October, 2018
Purpose: Since it was introduced around Halloween, so this unconfirmed update is regarded as having its own name. It was spread from the August broad-core algorithm update, and the leading search engine was introducing the use of neural matching.
Launch: 9 March, 2018
Purpose: This time, Google chose Twitter to announce that a broad core algorithm update was rolled out a week before. It was a rewarding update for those who were underrewarded but worked on building great content. All in all, it emphasised building original, relevant, and useful content. Later, its new updates followed, which were referred to as Medics.
Launch: March, 2018
Purpose: It was introduced to prioritize indexing the mobile version of any website. It would be weighed over its desktop counterpart. It emphasized the creation of mobile-friendly websites. It also ensured that the content should appear similarly on desktop and mobile phones. Its structure should be similar, containing the similar meta data on both versions.
- Maccabees
Launch: 12 December, 2017
Purpose: The update was initially felt between 12 & 14 of December, which was later confirmed by Google. It was announced that many minor changes to the core algorithm are done.
- Fall Flux
Launch: 8 September, 2017
Purpose: This was again an unconfirmed transformation in Google algorithms. Glen Gabe, the president of G-Squared Interactive, amplified his noise on the noteworthy changes being observed, which have impacted traffic and search visibility since September 8, which followed till October 12.
- June Update
Launch: 25 June, 2017
Purpose: Though unconfirmed, many SEO tracking tools found that the update was introduced through fluctuations in page ranking. It fluctuated mainly in the food and beverage industry.
- Fred
Launch: 7 March, 2017
Purpose: This algorithm update targeted low-value content. It was initially a joke, which later became a reality. Google’s Illyes officially confirmed it but did not share specifics. Later, Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines put the stamp of confirmation on.
- February Update
Launch: 1 February, 2017
Purpose: However, this was an unconfirmed update. But it appeared to be impacting private blog networks or websites that deal in spammy link-building.
- Intrusive Interstitials
Launch: 10 January, 2017
Purpose: This was related to intrusive interstitials and pop-ups that all of a sudden interrupt the search experience on mobile phones. Though it impacted, the effect was minimal on web ranking.
- Unnamed Update
Launch: 10 November, 2016
Purpose: It was not formally announced, but traces of new changes emerged through SEO tracking tools and in searches.
- Penguin 4.0 and Core Algorithm Integration
Launch: 23 September, 2016
Purpose: By then, Penguin was aligned to evaluate websites and links in real-time while devaluing links instead of downgrading their websites’ rankings.
- Panda & Core Algorithm Integration
Launch: 11 January, 2016
Purpose: Google introduced Panda into the core Google algorithm as a core ranking signal.
- Mobile-Friendly Update (2015)
Launch: 21 April, 2015
Purpose: Also known as Mobilegeddon, this update proved rewarding for mobile-friendly (responsive) websites. Such websites did well on SERPs, as they provided better results to searchers on their mobile phones. Its impact was seen globally.
- Quality Update
Launch : 3 May, 2015
Purpose: Also called the Phantom update, this algorithm revived Google’s core ranking algorithms. It improved its quality assessment signals. Its impact was visible when the websites with content quality issues and too many ads registered downfall in their ranking.
- RankBrain
Launch :26 October, 2015
Purpose: This is the 3rd most important ranking signal, which is actually a machine learning algorithm. It filters search results to provide the best answer to the queries.
- Pigeon
Launch : 24 July, 2014
Purpose : This update improved local searches as Google started rewarding local businesses that successfully created a strong organic presence with better visibility in traditional searches on Google Maps and searches.
- Payday Loan
Launch: 11 June, 2013
Purpose: With the introduction of this update, Google targets spammy queries that mostly come from shady industries (including super-high-interest loans and payday loans, porn, casinos, debt consolidation, and pharmaceuticals). Within 1-2 months, it profusely impacted about 0.3% of US queries.
- Hummingbird (2013)
Launch: 26 September, 2013
Purpose: This update completely changed the way Google returns the results. It introduced the revived structure of Google’s core search technology, which improved semantic search. This transformation helped the leading search engine understand user intent better and, hence, produce accurate results for difficult queries. This was the time when voice searches started growing. Nearly 90% of the searches were impacted.
- Venice
Launch : February, 2012
Purpose: It helped Google streamline search results on the basis of either the physical location of the searcher or their IP address. Google became agile to detect local intent or relevance with regard to a query or web page.
- Page Layout
Launch: October, 2012
Purpose: Google’s Matt Cutts announced it to create a seamless user experience by penalising websites that displayed too many ads above the fold with a low ranking. This update was introduced with the goal of avoiding lengthy scrolling down the page to see actual content.
- Exact Match Domain (EMD)
Launch : September 2012
Purpose: This algorithm emphasised freeing the SERPs from spammy and low-quality exact match domains from ranking.
- Penguin
Launch: 24 April, 2012
Purpose: It was launched to target websites containing spammy backlinks and manipulative backlink profiles. The motive for introducing the penguin update was to promote high-quality or natural link-building practices.
- Panda
Launch: 23 February, 2011
Purpose: It was introduced in February to improve search results, which was possible by penalising low-quality or thin content on the website. It completely disturbed the ranking of websites that had duplicate & erroneous content with stuffed keywords. It’s last update affected less than 1% of search results.