Updated: May 7th 2024


Every year, Google makes 1000's of changes to its algorithms and ranking systems.


Back in its infancy, Google only made a few updates to its search engine each year, but as the search behemoth has evolved, its audience has grown, and its language models and technology have become more advanced, updates are now an expected part of the search landscape.

The goal of these updates is to make results more relevant and to create a better search experience overall.

Understanding the history of Google algorithm updates is crucial for SEO's to develop an understanding of how search has evolved, and the impacts of their ranking systems on search results.


Think you've been impacted by an update? Chat with us today to see how our SEO team can help.

What is a Google algorithm update?

In the most basic terms, a Google algorithm update is when Google makes a change to its search engine system to improve one or more of the following factors in search results:

• Quality
• Relevancy
• User experience
  
  

‘Core’ or ‘Broad’ algorithm updates are the biggest changes, often adjusting several ranking factors at the same time. Not every website is impacted in the same way during an algorithm update.

What do the updates target?

Anything that might affect a user is targeted by algorithms, so updates focus on factors like:

• Content quality
• Links quality
• User experience
• Relevancy
• Expertise
• And more

What is a confirmed Google update?

Below, we’ll be listing both confirmed and unconfirmed updates, infrastructure changes, and algorithm tweaks. The important distinction between a confirmed and unconfirmed update is…

• Confirmed – Google have officially announced that an update is being rolled out, or confirmed that an update has already rolled out
  
  
• Unconfirmed – The SEO community have seen search volatility (rankings going up and down more than usual) and determined that there has probably been an update of some sort, but this has not been confirmed by Google themselves

2024

There have been two official Google updates so far in 2024. Details of these updates are below.

March 2024 Core Update

The March core update ran from March 5th and lasted for 45 days, eventually finishing rolling out on April 19th. Google only announced this on April 26th.



What you need to know

This update was largely focused on how Google identified the helpfulness of content.

Google stated that the update has resulted in 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results, having stated before the update rolled out that it "marks an evolution in how we identify the helpfulness of content".

The update was particularly volatile, with many sites seeing multiple losses and recoveries (or vice-versa) throughout the duration.

Full details can be found at Google Search Central.

March Spam Policy Update

Google have released three new spam policies alongside an update to enforce them. This started to roll our on the 5th March, and finished on the 20th March.

Any websites involved in the below practices could receive a manual action penalty. Google are specifically looking at penalising those who are doing any of the following to intentionally manipulate search results:

• Expired Domain Abuse - purchasing a domain or repurpose an old domain to host content that isn’t valuable to users
• Scaled Content Abuse - generating many unoriginal, unhelpful pages. This applies to pages both human and AI generated
• Site Reputation Abuse - this update tackled what has come to be known as 'Parasite SEO'. This involves publishing third-party pages with little or no first-party oversight or involvement - for example, coupon directories, sponsored or advertising pages that aren’t intended for usual readers/visitors

Despite being announced at the same time, the Site Reputation Abuse update took effect on May 5th 2024. This was so site owners had a chance to put their websites right.

This resulted in many sites receiving manual action penalties

Full details can be found at Google Search Central.

February

We also spotted SERP volatility in February. This sparked chatter about a potential update, but nothing was confirmed.

2023

The second half of 2023 was brutal, with Google releasing huge updates every month from August to November. There were 9 confirmed algorithm updates across the year.

• Reviews Update (November 2022)
• Core Algorithm Update (November 2022)
• Core Algorithm Update (October 2023)

Spam Update (October 2023) - An update targeting spam, specifically misleading, overly-promotional, duplicate and thin copy.

Helpful Content Update (September 2023) - Another update targeted at sites built solely to appease search engines. This had more impact than the Helpful Content Update.

Core Algorithm Update (August 2023) - The first in a sequence of core updates that occurred monthly until November, this was another mixed bag in terms of losses and wins.

Reviews Update (April 2023) - A significant, historically important update in the land of search - previously known as Product Review updates, Google removed ‘product’ from the name. This update marked a shift in which reviews would be impacted by the update, which was broadened to include ‘products, services, and things’. This does not include third-party reviews.

Core Update (March 2023) - The first core update of the year. According to data and chatter at the time of release, this update was quite volatile, with SEO’s reporting big gains, and big losses.

Product Reviews Update (February 2023) - The 6th update of its kind, this update took 14 days to roll out, and focused on websites that offer product review content. It covered reviews in other languages, including French, German, Italian, Russian, and more.

2022

Product Reviews Update (September 2022) - This was announced a week or so after the announcement of the September 2022 Core update.

Core Algorithm Update (September 2022) - An update that wasn’t as volatile as previous updates in May 2022 and November 2021. The most volatile sectors were the Travel and Real Estate niches.

Helpful Content Update (August 2022) - The helpful content update made it clear that content written only for search engines was no longer acceptable – cementing what all ethical SEOs already knew.

It rewarded websites that created ‘people first’ content that was genuinely helpful, high quality, and offered value. This is a ranking factor that is being continually refined, rather than a one-off update.

Core Algorithm Update (May 2022) - Another core update – this one took two weeks to roll out entirely and it is believed it largely focused on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust).

Page Experience Update - Mobile (March 2022) - The Page Experience update was introduced on mobile in 2021 but was only rolled out on mobile in 2022.

2021

Product Review Update (December 2021) - A follow on from the April 2021 Product Reviews Update.

Google released a couple more guidance points, advising review pages to demonstrate personal experience of using the product, and to give the user the option to purchase the product by providing multiple links to the product.

Core Algorithm Update (November 2021) -

Page Experience Update - Mobile (June 2021) - In 2020, Google announced that they would be introducing a new ranking factor, Page Experience.

This started to roll out in June 2021 and was fully implemented by August.

When looking at page experience, the algorithm assesses…

• Mobile usability
• Core web vitals
• Security issues
• And more
  
  

The goal of this update was to reward sites that provide a great page experience for searchers.

Product Review Update (April 2021) - The aim of this update was to reward websites that provide in-depth, unbiased product reviews. Google themselves stated that the update was to, “promote high quality product reviews”.

Google provided guidance on creating product review pages – here are a handful of the questions they suggest that creators consider when building their pages:

Do your reviews:

1. Explain what sets a product apart from its competitors?
2. Express expert knowledge about products where appropriate?
3. Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product, based on research into it?

2020

May 2020 Core Update

A broad core algorithm update released in May 2020. This update was another across-the-board update. As usual, Google gave no clues on the nature of this update, but algorithmic changes may have included tweaks to ranking factors like relevancy, E-A-T and link quality.

January 2020 Core Update

A broad core algorithm update released in January 2020. This hit websites across the board, but a study by Moz found that Health, Family & Community, Beauty & Personal Care, and Finance were some of the verticals that saw the biggest impact. These are mainly ‘YMYL’, or Your Money or Your Life niches, which tend to see a lot of movement during core updates because the importance of E-E-A-T is so high across the topics that they cover.

2019

June 2019 Core Update

An across-the-board algorithm update that saw lots of high-authority sites lose rankings and traffic very quickly. It was so impactful that CNN and the Daily Mail among other big sites came out to say how badly they had been hit by the update.

Marie Haynes completed an in-depth analysis of the June 2019 core algorithm update at the time. Her team believes that this update focused on trust factors, as websites that were hit seemed to be lacking in this area.

Diversity Update (June 2019)

The goal of the diversity update was to stop the same website ranking multiple times for the same query, introducing more diversity to search engine results pages.

This was rolled out around the same time as the June 2019 core algorithm update.

BERT (2019)

A natural language processing update that helps Google to read and process language on the web, helping the algorithm to understand what language actually means. With Bert, Google can understand the nuances and context around a piece of content, rather than taking it at face value.

For searchers, it means search is better at understanding the intent behind their queries so can return more relevant results. This Google blog has some good examples of queries and results pre and post Bert.

Name origins: BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

2018

Medic (August 2018)

A broad core algorithm update that was found to have an impact on websites in the medical/health niche. A study by Search Engine Roundtable found that of 300 websites they reviewed post-update, 41.5% that were affected were Health sites.

It’s believed that the update itself rewarded sites that showed considerable Expertise, Authority, and Trust factors (now known as E-E-A-T, an extra E was added for ‘experience’ later down the line). Medical sites will have been impacted heavily because it can be dangerous for websites in this niche to host information that doesn’t display considerable expertise and authority.

Name origins: it gained the nickname ‘medical’ because most sites targeted were medical sites.

Mobile-First Indexing (2018)

It is what it says on the tin – this update was a monumental shift that saw Google deciding which websites would rank for queries based on their mobile sites content rather than desktop. This change came after Google realised that most people who were utilising the search engine were searching from mobile.

The change didn’t take place immediately, but by 2021 all websites had been switched from desktop-first to mobile-first indexing.

2017

Fred (March 2017)

The Fred update was massive, causing huge traffic losses and gains across the web. It focused on stripping away low-quality websites with ‘in your face’ ads, meaning a lot of affiliate websites were hit.

Although, as usual, Google didn’t tell SEOs exactly what was being targeted with the update, they did say that it was ‘closely related to the quality section of the rater guidelines’. These are the guidelines that Google’s quality rater’s follow when manually reviewing websites. If you’re an SEO, it’s worth reading the Quality Rater Guidelines when you get an opportunity to.

Name origins: Gary Illyes joked on Twitter that every update without a name was to be called Fred. It stuck for this update...

Source

2016

Possum (September 2016)

An unconfirmed update that SEOs believe largely affected the local search pack. Although we’ve never had any official word from Google on this, one study found that it affected 64% of keywords in local search results that they assessed.

Name origins: Phil Rozek came up with this name, stating that the update caused a lot of Google Business listings to ‘play possum’, as they had been filtered out of the search pack and were no longer visible to business owners.

2015

RankBrain (October 2015)

A revolutionary machine learning algorithm to sort and provide more precise search results for users. After content and links, Google claims that RankBrain is the 3rd most important ranking factor. Before RankBrain was implemented, the algorithm was hand coded, so this was a huge step forwards for Google.

RankBrain automatically assesses how satisfied users are about search results based on lots of factors and tweaks the algorithm accordingly. It also decides how important different factors like links, content, etc. are for each individual keyword.

This algorithm is vastly complex, we found Backlinko’s Definitive Guide to RankBrain to be a really informative read if you want to learn more.

Mobile-Friendly Update (April 2015)

Known as Mobilegeddon in the SEO community, with searchers spending a lot more time on mobile, Google released the mobile friendly update to reward websites that gave mobile users a better experience. This meant website owners had to start focusing on their mobile sites, making them responsive and easy to navigate on smaller screens.

The first update of its kind, Google claimed that this only affected mobile search rankings, and not desktop rankings.

2014

Pigeon (July 2014)

An update aiming to make Local Search a better experience for users. This aimed to make local search look more similar to traditional search, limiting the local listing pack that appeared in the SERP from 7 -10 businesses to 3 - 4 businesses, but rewarding those with a better organic presence.

It also greatly improved the suggestions that searchers received for their searches based on their location and proximity to listed businesses.

Name origins: as well as fitting in with the other bird-themed updates Google have rolled out, a pigeon is known as a ‘homebird’, which seems fitting for an update targeting local search.

2013

Hummingbird (August 2013)

Rather than acting as a filter to the existing algorithm like the Panda and Penguin updates, Hummingbird was an overhaul of the core algorithm with the goal of serving up more relevant search results to users and having a better understanding of search intent.

Announced in September after running for a month, SEOs did not see a hugely significant or immediate impact to search results like they had done with previous updates. Impact was, however, seen in knowledge graphs and local search packs.

Essentially, Hummingbird is an algorithm that gives Google the ability to understand intent – bringing the concept of semantic search to life. This meant users started to see much more relevant results, and as a result, didn’t have to be overly specific with their searches anymore.

Hummingbird was the biggest change to Google search since the Caffeine update.

Name origins: Hummingbird was an apt choice of name for this algorithm, which brought greater speed and precision to search.

2012

Penguin (May 2012)

Penguin was at first known as the ‘webspam algorithm update’. Its main purpose was to target link spam across the web, aiming to squash link-building techniques that were designed to manipulate rankings. This came after the Panda update, which targets low quality content. Like Panda, it was periodically updated and refreshed until it was integrated into the main Google algorithm in 2016.

Name origins: Matt Cutts, who was the head of the Webspam team in 2012, named the algorithm update Penguin in a Tweet. Nobody is sure of the origin of the name.

2011

Panda (February 2011)

Panda was a major algorithm update released with the goal of stamping out black hat SEO and spam across the web. It came at a time when ‘content farms’ were popping up all over the place, mass producing spammy, spun content.

The Panda update largely targeted low quality, thin, and duplicated content, as well as websites with a higher ad-to-content ratio. After multiple refreshes to the Panda algorithm, it was incorporated into the core Google algorithm in 2015 instead of existing in its previous form as a filter.

Name origins: surprisingly, the name has nothing to do with the animal. The Panda update was named after the surname of Googler, Navneet Panda.

2010s

Google Instant (September 2010)
This search feature was removed in 2017. Essentially, it showed search results as the searcher was typing, and was a massive shift in how search worked.

The decision to scrap this function was made to make search more cohesive across devices as Mobile search became more popular. There were too many constraints to implementing the feature on mobile, so it made more sense to get rid of it.

2010s

Google Instant (September 2010)

This search feature was removed in 2017. Essentially, it showed search results as the searcher was typing, and was a massive shift in how search worked.

The decision to scrap this function was made to make search more cohesive across devices as Mobile search became more popular. There were too many constraints to implementing the feature on mobile, so it made more sense to get rid of it.

MayDay (May 2010)

An algorithm change that focused on pushing higher quality sites to the top of the search results for long tail queries. This was confirmed by Matt Cutts during a Q&A at Google I/O in 2010. The update targeted rankings rather than indexing or crawling.

According to Search Engine Land who wrote an article on the MayDay update at the time of it rolling out, it seemed to target websites with deep navigation structures without unique, valuable content.

Name origins: SEOs coined this the ‘MayDay’ update simply because it finished rolling out in May.

Caffeine (June 2010)

With the web growing at a faster pace than ever, Google had to meet searcher expectations by serving up content faster.

The caffeine update completely changed the rate at which Google refreshes its index. Its old index was made up of ‘layers’, some of which would refresh faster than others. But the main layer would still only refresh every few weeks, so new content wasn’t served up fast enough.

With Caffeine, the web is analysed and Google’s search index is updated continuously, adding new pages straight to the index. This update made the search engine a lot more scalable than it was previously.

Google Suggest (August 2008)

This is the function that auto-suggests results as you type in the search bar.

The result of years of testing, search wouldn’t be the same today without the Suggest feature. Google started Suggest as a Google Labs project in 2004.

Image source (left)

Universal Search (May 2007)

This was an update that started to incorporate news, images, books, maps, and other result types within the web search results. The Universal Search update is the change that started to introduce different SERP features to standard search results.

Upuntil the release of this update, a standard web search was more-or-less 10 plain blue links. Introducing universal search meant blending all information sources together.

Big Daddy (December 2005)

Rather than an algorithm update, this was an update to the overall search infrastructure centred around the rollout of two new data centres. SEOs have theorised that the infrastructure changes were probably focusing on redirects and canonicalization. The only confirmation from Google was that the change was about improving the quality of search results, but they have never given any further details. 

Google announced this update before rolling it out, and the rollout lasted several months. It began in December 2005 and finished in March 2006.

Name origins: someone called Jeff M came up with this name during an informal discussion with Matt Cutts, the then head of the webspam team of Google, after Cutts had asked the group for suggestions.

Nofollow (January 2005)

The nofollow attribute is/was used to tag sponsored, potential spam, or ad-related links. In 2019, new attributes were introduced (rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc”) to help webmasters clearly define the purposes of links that appear on their site.

Nofollow is a linking attribute introduced by Google to combat comment spam. The idea was that links within comment sections or other user-generated sections of websites would be marked as ‘nofollow’, telling Google to disregard them.

Google Personalised Search (November 2005)

Personalised search uses browser cookies and other data sources to serve personalised results to each user. It also uses web history, and demographic information provided by the user to deliver these results.

Personalised search left beta stage in 2005 but was only available to those with Google accounts. It wouldn’t be rolled out to all Google Search users until 2009.

Name origins: this update allowed search to be personalised, serving more relevant results to searchers.

Florida (November 2003)

Though Google never confirmed what Florida was about, it’s believed that it was a link analysis update. This update put Google in many smaller businesses black books. 

Many non-spam websites suffered and were labelled as ‘false positives’. Since the update was released just before the winter holidays, the loss of revenue by these sites was significant.

Known as Google’s first major algorithm update, the changes made in the ‘Florida’ update shook up search engine results significantly.

Name origins: This update happened just before Pubcon Florida was held in Orlando.

Boston (February 2003)

Google announced that they would be tweaking the algorithm once every month or so.

The ‘Boston’ update was Google’s first official algorithm update.

Name origins: The announcement about their plans to start updating their algorithm took place at the Northeastern SES Boston engineering science conference, which is how the first update got its name.

Sources

searchenginejournal.com

searchengineland.com

semrush.com

moz.com

blog.google

developers.google.com