Google Algorithm Updates History

The reviews update now covers products, services, destinations, games, movies or other topics. This is the final Reviews update as this system is going to be real time. This update completed on December 7th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-E-A-T or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update completed on November 28th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-E-A-T or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update completed on October 19th.

This update to Google's spam detection systems will improve their coverage in many languages and spam types. It aims to clean up several types of spam that were reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages. It targets cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam. This update completed on October 20th.

Helpful content updates promote more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic. Google mentioned that this update improved the classifier. This update completed on September 28th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-E-A-T or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update completed on September 7th.

The reviews update now covers products, services, destinations, games, movies or other topics. This update was completed on April 25th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-E-A-T or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on March 28th.

Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update applies to content in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish. This update was completed on March 7th.

Google is using their AI-based spam-prevention system SpamBrain against links for the first time. It can detect sites buying links and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links and will remove any value those links provided. This update is global and affects all languages. This update was completed on January 12th, 2023.

This update improves Google's classifier which now works across all languages. Helpful content updates promote more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic. This update was completed on January 12th, 2023.

Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. This update was completed on October 21st.

Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update targets specifically English-language product reviews. It was completed on September 26th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on September 26th.

Helpful content updates promote more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic. This update will take up to 2 weeks to roll out.

Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update targets specifically English-language product reviews and was completed on August 2nd.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on June 9th.

Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update was completed on April 6th.

Page Experience updates are designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences. This includes mobile friendliness, intrusive interstitials, safe browsing, and speed metrics referred to as Core Web Vitals. This update was completed on March 3rd.

Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update was completed on December 21st.

Local search updates focus on making local search results better for users. They are typically rebalancing factors such as relevance, distance, and prominence. This update was completed on December 8th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on November 30th.

Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. This update was completed on November 11th.

This was a change to how Google writes titles for pages in the SERP. More titles are now rewritten and each page generally has one title now. Previously, titles could change depending on the query.

Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. As the name implies, this particular update targeted link spam. This update was completed on August 24th

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on July 12th.

Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. This update was completed the same day.

Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. This update was completed the same day.

Page Experience updates are designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences. This includes mobile friendliness, intrusive interstitials, safe browsing, and speed metrics referred to as Core Web Vitals. This update was completed on September 2nd.

This update targets sites that may engage in predatory practices when it comes to harassing people.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on June 12th.

Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update was completed on April 22nd.

Passage ranking helps specific passages within pages to rank better for relevant queries. This update was completed on February 15th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on December 16th.

Subtopic ranking helped Google to better understand relevant subtopics for some search results and show a wider range of relevant content. Date is approximate.

A couple separate bugs happening at the same time led to some flux in the SERPs. Mobile Indexing bug fixed October 8th. Canonical issue fixed October 14th.

A major bug shook up Google search results on this day. Many SEOs noticed a lot of low quality sites ranking higher. Fixed the 11th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on May 18th.

This update made it so your page is only listed once in SERPs. Prior to this, a page could have the featured snippet and another organic listing.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

BERT uses machine learning to help understand user queries better and to return more relevant results.

Local search updates focus on making local search results better for users. They are typically rebalancing factors such as relevance, distance, and prominence. This particular update also introduced neural matching which helps Google better understand how words are related to concepts. This update was completed on December 2nd.

BERT uses machine learning to help understand user queries better and to return more relevant results.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

The Site Diversity Update makes it so that one site will rarely have more than 2 organic listings in a SERP.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

A bug on Google's end made a lot of pages drop out of the index. This was fixed by April 10th.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. Some SEOs also call this the Medic update. This update was completed on August 8th.

This update made it so that some of the slowest websites were not as visible in search results. There was some testing prior to this date.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

Mobile-First Indexing was a change in how Google indexed pages. They switched from using the desktop version of pages to the mobile version. This means that content and links seen on mobile pages are what are ultimately indexed. While some sites were moved before this date, this is the date when the first big batch of websites were moved.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

Google officially launched a search feature related to jobs.

Project Owl was a quality update designed to reduce offensive and misleading pages in search results.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was also referred to as Fred, a nickname given to it by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes.

The Intrusive Interstitial Penalty targeted sites with popups that made content less accessible.

The hacked spam update aimed to demote hacked websites in search results.

Google's Penguin algorithm was made to target webspam. This update integrated Penguin with the Core algorithm. It also changed from demoting pages to a system that tries to simply ignore bad links. This update was completed on October 12th.

Google launched rich cards. These are special SERP features powered by structured data. You can see the various features in the search gallery.

The second Mobile-Friendly Update increased the effect of the ranking signal. It was intended to make mobile-friendly sites rank even better.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.

Google started to crawl and index the HTTPS version of pages over the HTTP versions.

RankBrain is using machine learning to better understand search queries and return relevant results. Launched months before it was announced.

Panda updates aim to adjust rankings based on website quality. Panda 4.2 rolled out over several months.

Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was also referred to as "The Quality Update" and "Phantom 2".

The Mobile-Friendly Update, also referred to as Mobilegeddon, helped to reward websites who are mobile-friendly.

This was a webspam update that specifically targeted doorway pages.