Reviews Update (April 12, 2023)

Taking 13 days, ending on April 25, the latest reviews update created more volatility in Google’s search results than past versions of the update.
This was the seventh reviews update and the first Google update that targeted more than just product reviews, extending to business services, holiday destinations, games and movie reviews etc.
There was also a change of name from ‘product reviews system’ to ‘reviews system’.

The guidance documentation titled “Google Search’s reviews system and your website” also now refers to all types of reviews not just to products.

March 2023 Core Update (March 15, 2023)

Announced to the world via Twitter, the update was completed by 28 March.
Although there was much talk about its impact and use of the word ‘significant’, there was no drop in ranking position for any clients looked after by Thinking IT. There were a few changes further down the page, but nothing significant to report.

Product Reviews Update (February 21, 2023)

As Google puts it: “The reviews system aims to better reward high quality reviews, which is content that provides insightful analysis and original research and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.” The page explains more about how the reviews system works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.

You can read How the reviews system works at Google Search Central.

Rolled out on 21 February, it was officially complete on March 7.
Interestingly, as the update’s name suggests, product structured data may be looked at, as well as the overall layout and ease of use pertaining to ecommerce websites that contain product reviews.

Latest update to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience (December 15, 2022)

While not an official update, the update to ‘E-A-T Guidelines‘ deserves special mention to finish the year on, given the number of recent updates covering spam, product reviews and helpful content.
Google added an extra ‘E’ which is now part of the updated search rater guidelines, just released.

Essentially Google looks at the content or review and asks, “Does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product”.

Good further reading from Google Search Central:

A guide to Google Search ranking systems
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

A Summary:

There are no shortcuts to achieving number 1 positions within search engine result pages. Trying to manipulate content, especially with regards to implementing AI content writing programs will devalue your pages and website.
While the number of ‘pretenders’ taking advantage of the ignorant or gullible is on the increase, there has never been a more important time since the origin of search to follow best practice procedures. You’ll not only save money, but you’ll also make money with customers wanting to use your services or buy your products.

Link Spam Update (December 14, 2022)

As has become a regular feature, via Twitter, Google announced the launch of the December 2022 Link Spam Update, which rolled out on December 14 and finished up on January 12. With this update, Google is ‘leveraging the power of SpamBrain to neutralize the impact of unnatural links on search results’.

As Google puts it: “SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. Besides using it to detect spam directly, it can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.”

You can read all about fighting link spam at the official Google Search Central Blog.

Helpful Content Update (December 5, 2022)

Google, via Twitter announced the launch of the December 2022 Helpful Content Update. Starting on December 5, the rollout was wrapped up on January 12.

The search giant claims to be cracking down harder on AI generated content, penalising websites that have content written by programs over handwritten content.
The ‘helpful content system‘ algorithm will be updated often to catch content written specifically for search engines rather than to help or inform people with good user experience.

October 2022 Spam Update (October 19, 2022)

Google announced via Twitter, a spam update, which began rolling out on October 19, finishing up on October 21.

Google Search Central Blog contains an explanation of what announced spam updates entail, over and above their general spam policy for web search.

Google Search Essentials, a revamped and renamed document, aimed to be more helpful to content writers over ‘webmasters’ outlines how content can perform better on Search.
The Key best practices section gives a simplified overview of how seo specialists tackle writing content, minus all the actual algorithm details of course.
Content writers offer a valuable service to website owners, but only those experienced with search engine optimisation (seo) should be hired, such as those from Thinking IT, otherwise your pages will be penalised, not rank in search engine result pages, which means you’ll be simply throwing your hard-earned money away.

Product Reviews Algorithm Update (September 20, 2022)

Google confirmed via Twitter the rollout of a new product review algorithm update, which was completed on September 26. In line with updates of this nature, the effect was negligible if websites updated their site and cleaned up spammy reviews previously. Quality beats quantity, so focus on well written reviews without links to other websites which are often seen as a paid link building exercise.

You can read more about Google Search’s reviews system and your website on the Google Search Central Blog.

September Core Algorithm Update (September 12, 2022)

Google announced a core-algorithm update, on Twitter, which began rolling out on September 12 and was completed on September 26 (US/Pacific time).
Read about core updates in general on the Google Search Central Blog.

Helpful Content Update (August 25, 2022)

The Helpful Content Update, announced by Google on Twitter, was about rewarding content that put ‘people first’ and to penalise content written primarily for SEO. It officially rolled out over two weeks (ending on September 9th), with an unusual pre-announcement just one week in advance.
The effect was not noticed unless websites used AI programs to write automated content and they were devalued significantly.

Read more at Google’s Search Central Blog, written for content writers in the hope of improving the quality of blogs.

Product Reviews Update (July 27, 2022)

Announced via Twitter, and explained in detail on Google Search Central, the aim of the update was to better reward high quality roduct reviews, in particular insightful analysis and original content written by authoritative people, experts and enthusiasts. The update is aimed to those that sell products on ecommerce websites.

May 2022 Broad Core Update (May 25, 2022)

Formally announced by Danny Sullivan of Google, this update is the first since November 2021. The reason given for this core algorithm update was to “Keep pace with the changing nature of the web”. Expected to take 1-2 weeks to fully roll out, there’s been no impact to clients ranking positions.

More Helpful Product Reviews (March 23, 2022)

While not a traditional algorithm update, Google released a third version of the ‘Products Reviews Update’ first released back in April 2021. The update rewards review content that goes ‘above and beyond’ what is typically found when reviewing products.
Building on the first two, Google says this update enhances Google’s “ability to identify high quality product reviews” and to “reward creators who are earnest in being helpful”.

Read ‘More helpful product reviews on Search’ from Google to see what criteria matters now.

Top Stories Redesign (December 6, 2021)

While not a traditional algorithm update, Google released a major overhaul to the layout of ‘Top Stories’, splitting it into two columns on desktop and in many cases, dramatically increasing the amount of SERP space occupied by news results.

Product Reviews Update (December 1, 2021)

Google formally announced another major update to reward high quality product reviews which also included a refresh of the April 2021 update.
This update was rolled out over three weeks and looked at rewarding product reviews that were deemed trustworthy and useful. Reviews containing video evidence of products being tested would benefit, as would those that gave visitors several links to multiple sellers.

Read Product reviews update and your site release from Google.

Core Update (November 17, 2021)

On November 17, Google announced the rollout of a core update. While this update officially wrapped up at the end of November, most tracking sites showed the strongest single-day spike on November 17. The impact of and overlap with Black Friday sparked so much controversy across the SEO community, the search giant was forced to acknowledge the poor timing, suggesting they would look at the timing of major releases with major events.

Spam Update (November 3, 2021)

Google announced another broad spam update, which was rolled out over 8 days. Unlike the July update, this was not specifically called a ‘link spam’ update and there was not much detail about the sites and tactics targeted.

Page Title Rewrites (August 16, 2021)

Starting around August 16, SEOs began to notice a substantial increase in Google rewriting page titles in SERPs. The change was later confirmed and after many complaints about result quality issues, scaled back some of the changes in September.

Read An update to how we generate web page titles released by Google.

Link Spam Update (July 26, 2021)

It was announced an update to how the Google algorithm handles ‘link spam’. This was a broad algorithm update across multiple languages.

Read A reminder on qualifying links and our link spam update released by Google.

Core Update (July 1, 2021)

A follow-up to the June Core Update, the July 2021 Core Update was rolled out over a the first 14 days of July. Like most ‘Core Updates’, it was light on specifics.

Page Experience Update (June 25, 2021)

After several delays, Google started rolling out the Page Experience Update on June 25th, saying the rollout would continue through August 2021. This update included Core Web Vitals and impacted both organic results and News results (including Top Stories).

Spam Updates (June 24, 2021)

Google released two updates, on June 24th and June 28th dealing with spam. It was unclear how the two updates were connected or what specifically was impacted. While specific sites showed significant impacts, there was no clear impact on overall rankings volatility.

Read June 2021 spam update released by Google to see the vagueness, referring to their Webmaster guidelines specifically the section ‘Avoid the following techniques’ under Specific guidelines.

Core Update (June 2, 2021)

In an unprecedented move, Google simultaneously announced the apparently connected June and July 2021 Core Updates. The June Core Update rolled out in the first 2 weeks of June.

(MUM) (May 18, 2021)

While this is not an algorithm update, it’s the announcement of a new technology that is about a 1,000 times more powerful than BERT (released back on October 22, 2019) and capable of multitasking to connect information for users in new ways. Internal pilot programs are running, so expect a formal algorithm update around this.

The importance of user experience with an understanding of user intent, what’s really behind the search query is what MUM analyses, taking all mediums into consideration not just text and images, and it’s not just about matching keyword phrasing anymore.

Read MUM: A new AI milestone for understanding information from Google.

Read Search, explore and shop the world’s information, powered by AI from Google.

Product Reviews Update (April 8, 2021)

Officially announced, an update to reward more detailed reviews over thin reviews and spammy affiliates. The update focused on review quality and detail, listing the exact factors Google was looking for in product reviews.

Read What creators should know about Google’s product reviews update released by Google for more detail.

Passage Indexing (US/English) (February 10, 2021)

Google rolled out ‘passage indexing’ for US/English queries saying it was not something webmasters had to make any changes for, reiterating the focus should be on great content. Google initially estimated this update would impact 7% of queries.

Passage Ranking is essentially new technology designed to improve the search engine’s ability to identify and rank relevant passages within a web page. Structured HTML page layout will be important moving forward, so Google can read and bring relevant sections into its SERP.

Core Update (December 4, 2020)

Google announced a Core Update that rolled out quickly, with no information on what was addressed. Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search stated ‘Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before’ with a link to the Core updates page.

Indexing Bug, Pt. 2 (October 12, 2020)

Google claimed that the bulk of the mobile-indexing and canonicalization bug(s) had been fixed.
Taking to Twitter, ‘We are currently working to resolve two separate indexing issues… that have impacted some URLs. One is with mobile-indexing. The other is with canonicalization, how we detect and handle duplicate content. In either case, pages might not be indexed’.

Indexing Bug, Pt. 1 (September 29, 2020)

Google confirmed an indexing and canonicalization bug starting in early September. The bug related to which URLs the search engine is selecting as the canonical URL. Basically, the algorithm seemed to have swapped out one URL with another unrelated URL for many web sites.

Google Glitch (August 10, 2020)

Google suffered a significant algorithm glitch on August 10th that caused major fluctuations with the search results. After hours of speculation, John Mueller from Google admitted that this was a glitch and not the result of a major core update.

Google’s search results started to look similar to Bing’s search results. Exact match URL’s, and Directory sites dominated the first page of SERPs in a throwback to the days when PageRank was a determining factor with Google.

The official explanation was sent out on Twitter Tuesday August 11, 2020:
“On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated.
Thank you for your patience!”
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) August 11, 2020.

Core Update (May 4, 2020)

Yet another Core Update was officially announced, the second of 2020, which caused many ranking changes. Travel, real estate and health sites were amongst the industries that saw the biggest fluctuations.
Sites that suffered most had a lot of content that was dated or out of date and had a high amount of pages with very ‘thin content’, low word count.

Featured Snippet De-duping (January 22, 2020)

Google announced that URLs in Featured Snippets would no longer be appearing as traditional organic results, in line with Google’s philosophy that a Featured Snippet is a promoted organic result. This had significant implications for rank-tracking and organic CTR.

Danny Sullivan Google’s Search Liaison confirmed this on Twitter saying “If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat the listing in the search results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show.”

Core Update (January 13, 2020)

Google rolled another core update, announced on twitter:

“Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the January 2020 Core Update.
Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before.
Please see this blog post for more about that: https://t.co/e5ZQUA3RC6

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 13, 2020″.

Being a broad core update, the January 2020 core update will impact all search results on a worldwide scale. It’s not an update that targets something specific that webmasters can improve upon, like the ‘Speed Update’.

International BERT Roll-out (December 9, 2019)

Google confirmed that the BERT natural language processing algorithm was rolling out internationally, in 70 languages.

BERT Update (October 22, 2019)

Google upgraded their algorithm and underlying hardware to support the BERT natural language processing (NLP) model. BERT helps Google better interpret natural language searches and understand context.

BERT is an update to the RankBrain algorithm. This is an update that uses artificial intelligence to sort out search results and tries to make a more intuitive experience for searches, especially those using ‘voice search’ which tends to be longer.
BERT stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers” and uses machine learning to determine what keywords are similar. This way, if websites that don’t necessarily have the exact keywords the search has, but the content is similar, it can show up on searches, especially if the content is of high quality. In short, the algorithm tries to interpret what you’re searching for instead of just using those exact words typed to find results.

Read more about BERT with an article written by Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search: Understanding searches better than ever before

Core Update (September 24, 2019)

Google rolled out another core update and seemed to impact sites affected by previous core updates. Predictably, Google didn’t provide many details.

Site Diversity Update (June 6, 2019)

As is now commonplace, Google, via Danny Sullivan, used its Search Liaison twitter account to announce that a change had been made to its search results. Google announced a ‘site diversity’ update, claiming it would improve situations where websites had more than two organic listings. The update did effect many Thinking IT clients that had 3-5 URLs on the first page of SERP. This meant that additional competitors now appeared at the bottom.
In other words, domain diversity increased. I could be forgiven for thinking diversity trumped relevancy, I believe it did.
The counter argument is the result gives more choice for shoppers and people after information by showing more diversity. While true, it’s obviously quality flawed. But that’s our inclusion society!

Core Update (June 3, 2019)

Google pre-announced a ‘core’ update, with limited details. Websites impacted in previous core updates were hit again. Many magazine and blog sites reported heavy losses.

Indexing Bugs (May 23, 2019)

Two days in a row, Google confirmed indexing bugs. The first bug reportedly was preventing new content from being properly indexed.

Deindexing Bug (April 5, 2019)

Google confirmed a bug that dropped pages from the search index around the weekend of April 5th. Most sites recovered soon after.

Core Update (March 12, 2019)

Google confirmed a ‘core’ update, stating it was the third major core update since they began using that terminology.

‘Medic’ Core Update (August 1, 2018)

Google confirmed a ‘core’ update, via Twitter with a statement saying.

The update, while not specifically targeting health, fitness and medical sites, was dubbed the ‘Medic’ update due to the massive number of those categories websites effected.
Many Ecommerce and business websites that had a high advertising content of medical and health products or services were penalised as were ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) sites. The update showed Google’s continuing focus to improve standards with regards to expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (EAT).
In summary, websites that were thin on quality content and contained aggressive and deceptive advertising to affiliates, plus sites with performance issues, annoying pop ups and poor user experience suffered, as they should in SERP.

Chrome Security Warnings (Full Site) (July 24, 2018)

After warning users of unsecured (non-HTTPS) forms months earlier, Chrome 68 began marking all non-HTTPS sites as ‘not secure’. Links from and to non-secure sites impact on the quality of the link.

Mobile Speed Update (July 9, 2018)

After first announcing it, back on January 17, 2018, Google rolled out the mobile page speed update, making page speed a ranking factor for mobile results. Google claimed that this only affected the slowest mobile sites, and there was no evidence of major mobile rankings shifts.

Read Using page speed in mobile search ranking from Google Search Central Blog.

Video Carousels (June 14, 2018)

In a change of design, videos from organic-like results with thumbnails moved into a dedicated video carousel, causing a change in results that were previously tracked as organic. At the same time, the number of SERPs with videos increased significantly.
There is now absolutely no competition between the carousel and any of the other SERP features. The video carousels solely compete with organic results for SERP space and can appear next to any combination of other features.

Snippet Length Drop (May 13, 2018)

After testing longer display snippets of up to 300+ characters for about 5 months, Google rolled back most snippets to the former limit (about 150-160 characters).

Core Update (April 17, 2018)

Google confirmed a “core” update, but didn’t provide any specifics and the update wasn’t named by the search giant or the SEO community. The update aimed at improving user experience by delivering relevant content for search queries.

Mobile-First Index Roll-out (March 26, 2018)

Google announced ‘Rolling out mobile-first indexing’ was happening, after testing for a year and a half. The focus was on how Google gather all content, not about how the content ranked.

Note Google has since updated the above post with: ‘Mobile-first indexing best practices’

Zero-result SERP Test (March 14, 2018)

On a small set of Knowledge Cards, including some time/date queries and unit conversion calculators, Google started displaying zero organic results and a ‘Show all results’ button. A week later, Google stopped this test.

‘Brackets’ Core Update (March 7, 2018)

Google confirmed a ‘core’ update on March 7th, lasting 2 weeks. The ‘broad’ update focused on quality content.

Snippet Length Increase (November 30, 2017)

After testing longer search snippets for over two years, Google increased them across a large number of results. This led to adopt a new Meta Description limit, up to 300 characters from the previous 155-160.
Google confirmed an update to how snippets are handled, but didn’t provide details.

Chrome Security Warnings (Forms) (October 17, 2017)

With the launch of Chrome 62, Google started warning visitors to sites with unsecured forms. While not an algorithm update, this was an important step in Google’s push towards HTTPS, having a valid SSL.

This should be a warning of what can be expected in the future, websites that are HTTPS will rank higher than those that aren’t secure.

Google Jobs (June 20, 2017)

Google officially launched their jobs portal, including a stand alone 3-pack of job listings in search results. These results drew data from major providers, including LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, and CareerBuilder.

Read more at: ‘Connect to job seekers with Google Search’

Update (February 6, 2017)

Algorithm changes beginning on February 1st continued for a week, targeting ‘Private Blog Networks’ (PBNs). An unofficial update to ‘Penguin’, or a newer algorithm targeting links to find more links that should be discredited.

Intrusive Interstitial Penalty (January 10, 2017)

Google started rolling out a penalty to punish aggressive interstitials and pop-ups (lowering rankings) that might impede the mobile user experience. Google also provided a rare warning of this update five months in advance.

Google explained which types of interstitials are going to be problematic, including:

1. Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page
2. Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
3. Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inline underneath the fold.

Penguin 4.0, Phase 1 (September 27, 2016)

The first phase of Penguin 4.0, was the rollout of the new, ‘softer’ Penguin algorithm, which devalues bad links instead of penalising websites.

Penguin 4.0 Announcement (September 23, 2016)

After almost 2 years of waiting, Google finally announced a major Penguin update. They suggested the new Penguin is now real-time and baked into the ‘core’ algorithm. Initial impact assessments were small, but it was later revealed that the Penguin 4.0 rollout was unusually long and multi-phase.

Mobile-friendly 2 (May 12, 2016)

Just more than a year after the original ‘mobile friendly’ update, Google rolled out another ranking signal boost to benefit mobile-friendly sites on mobile search. Since all Thinking IT clients have beautiful responsive sites, there was no changes to their ranking positions in SERP.

AdWords Shake-up (February 23, 2016)

Google made major changes to AdWords display, removing right-column ads entirely and rolling out 4-ad top blocks on many commercial searches. While this was a paid search update, it had significant implications for CTR for both paid and organic results, especially on competitive keywords.

RankBrain (October 26, 2015)

Google made a major announcement, revealing that machine learning had been a part of the algorithm for months, contributing to the 3rd most influential ranking factor.

RankBrain catches queries that no one is searching for (15% of search queries everyday are new).

Panda 4.2 (#28) (July 17, 2015)

Google announced a Panda update, saying it could take months to fully roll out. There were no clear signs of a major algorithm update.

The Quality Update (May 3, 2015)

After many reports of large-scale ranking changes, originally dubbed ‘Phantom 2’, Google acknowledged a core algorithm change impacting ‘quality signals’. This update seems to have had a broad impact, with no specifics about the nature of the signals involved.

Mobile Update AKA ‘Mobilegeddon’ (April 22, 2015)

In a rare move, Google pre-announced an algorithm update, saying mobile rankings would differ for mobile-friendly sites starting on April 21st. Only search rankings on mobile devices were effected negatively if their user experience was poor.

The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, the webpage could still rank high if it has great content, relevant to the query.

Pigeon Expands (UK, CA, AU) (December 22, 2014)

Google’s major local algorithm update, dubbed ‘Pigeon’, expanded to the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The original update hit the United States in July 2014.

The update is focused on providing the ranking of local listings in SERP. The changes will also affect the search results shown in Google Maps. This update provides the results based on the user location (IP address) and the listing available in the local directory.

Penguin Everflux (December 10, 2014)

Google said that ‘Penguin’ had shifted to continuous updates, moving away from infrequent, major updates. This falls in line with Google saying they make daily updates to their algorithm.

Pirate 2.0 (October 21, 2014)

More than two years after the original DMCA/’Pirate’ update, Google launched another update to combat software and digital media piracy. This update was highly targeted, causing dramatic drops in ranking to a relatively small group of sites that had copied content, specifically copyright owned images outright from other websites, often from large News based sites.

Penguin 3.0 (October 17, 2014)

After more than a year since the previous Penguin update (2.1), Google announced a Penguin refresh spread out over several weeks.

‘In The News’ Box (October 1, 2014)

Google made what looked like a display change to News-box results, but later announced that they had expanded news links to a much larger set of potential sites. The presence of news results in SERPs also increased with major news sites reporting substantial traffic increases.

Panda 4.1 (#27) (September 23, 2014)

Google announced a significant Panda update, which included an algorithmic component. Google estimate the impact would effect at 3-5% of search queries.

Authorship Removed (August 28, 2014)

Following up on the June 28th drop of authorship photos, Google announced that they would be completely removing authorship mark-up and would no longer process it. This meant authorship by-lines would disappeared from all SERPs.

As you will read throughout this page, Google change their mind on ventures often. Sadly however, the immense amount of work done by webmasters to comply with changes when first announced means work done was a waste of valuable time.

HTTPS/SSL Update (August 6, 2014)

After months of speculation, Google announced that they would be giving preference to HTTPS secure sites, and that adding SSL encryption would provide a ranking boost. They stressed that this boost would start out small, but implied it might increase if the changed proved to be positive.

Pigeon (July 24, 2014)

Google changed the local SEO world with an update that dramatically altered many local results and modified how they handle and interpret location signals.
Google stated ‘Pigeon’ created closer ties between the local algorithm and the core algorithm.

Authorship Photo Drop (June 25, 2014)

John Mueller made a surprise announcement saying that Google would be dropping all authorship photos from SERPs, after heavily promoting authorship as a connection to Google+.

Payday Loan 3.0 (June 12, 2014)

Google announced that they were continuing to target ‘very spammy queries’ that typically get associated with excessive web spam. Payday loans, insurance, accident claims and other similar websites would be a focus of the third iteration of its Payday loan algorithm.

Panda 4.0 (#26) (May 19, 2014)

Google confirmed a major Panda update that included both an algorithm update and a data refresh. Officially, about 7.5% of English-language queries were affected.

Payday Loan 2.0 (May 16, 2014)

Just prior to Panda 4.0, Google updated it’s ‘payday loan’ algorithm, targeting especially spammy queries.

Page Layout #3 (February 6, 2014)

Google updated their page layout algorithm, also known as ‘top heavy’. Originally launched in January 2012, the page layout algorithm penalises sites with too many ads ‘above the fold’, on the first page before scrolling.

Penguin 2.1 (#5) (October 4, 2013)

After almost 5 months, Google launched another Penguin update. The 2.1 designation suggests a data update and not a major change to the Penguin algorithm.

Hummingbird (August 20, 2013)

Announced on September 26th, Google suggested the ‘Hummingbird’ update rolled out about a month earlier. ‘Hummingbird’ has been compared to ‘Caffeine’, and is a core algorithm update that drives changes to semantic search and the Knowledge Graph.

In-depth Articles (August 6, 2013)

Google added a new type of news result called ‘In-depth Articles’, dedicated to more evergreen, long-form content.

Read ‘In-depth articles in search results’ from Google’s Search Central Blog.

Panda Recovery (July 18, 2013)

Google confirmed an update to ‘Panda’ with the implication being a softening of previous Panda penalties.

Multi-Week Update (June 27, 2013)

Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted suggesting a ‘multi-week’ algorithm update. The nature of the update was not made unclear, but there were massive rankings changes to many webpages appearing around the middle of SERPs. It appears that Google may have been testing some changes that were later rolled back.

“Payday Loan” Update (June 11, 2013)

Google announced a targeted algorithm update to take on niches with notoriously spammy results, specifically mentioning payday loans and porn in search queries.

Penguin 2.0 (#4) (May 22, 2013)

After months of speculation, the 4th Penguin update, named ‘2.0’ by Google was launched. The exact nature of the changes weren’t made clear.

Domain Crowding (May 21, 2013)

Google released an update to control domain crowding/diversity deep in the SERPs (pages 2+). Largely irrelevant, who visits the second page?

Panda #24 (January 22, 2013)

Google announced its first official update of 2013, claiming 1.2% of search queries would be affected.

Panda #23 (December 21, 2012)

Right before the Christmas holiday, Google rolled out another ‘Panda’ update. They officially called it a ‘refresh’, impacting 1.3% of English queries.

Knowledge Graph Expansion (December 4, 2012)

Google added Knowledge Graph functionality to non-English queries, including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian. This update was ‘more than just translation’ and added enhanced Knowledge Graph capabilities.

Panda #22 (November 21, 2012)

After some mixed signals, Google confirmed the 22nd Panda update, which appeared to have been data-only.

Panda #21 (November 5, 2012)

Google rolled out their 21st Panda update, roughly 6 weeks after Panda #20. This update was reported to be smaller, officially impacting 1.1% of English queries.

Page Layout #2 (October 9, 2012)

Google announced an update to its original page layout algorithm change back in January, which targeted pages with too many ads above the fold, on the first page before scrolling.

Penguin #3 (October 5, 2012)

After suggesting the next Penguin update would be major, Google released a minor data update, impacting just ‘0.3% of queries’. Penguin update numbering was rebooted, similar to Panda, this was the 3rd Penguin release.

65-Pack (October 4, 2012)

Google published their monthly (bi-monthly?) list of search highlights. The 65 updates for August and September included 7-result SERPs, Knowledge Graph expansion, updates to how ‘page quality’ is calculated, and changes to how local results are determined.

Read ‘Google Webmaster Guidelines updated’ for Google’s explanation and links to their updated ‘Quality Guidelines’.

Panda #20 (September 27, 2012)

Overlapping the EMD update, a fairly major Panda update (algorithm + data) rolled out, officially affecting 2.4% of queries. As the 3.X series was getting odd, industry sources opted to start naming Panda updates in order (this was the 20th).

Exact-Match Domain (EMD) Update (September 27, 2012)

Google announced a change in the way it was handling exact-match domains (EMDs). This led to large-scale devaluation of poor quality content websites. Google officially stated ‘0.6% of queries’ would be effected.

Panda 3.9.2 (#19) (September 18, 2012)

Google rolled out another Panda refresh, which appears to have been data-only. Ranking flux was moderate but not on par with a large-scale algorithm update.

Panda 3.9.1 (#18) (August 20, 2012)

Google rolled out yet another Panda data update, but the impact seemed to be fairly small. Since the Panda 3.0 series ran out of numbers at 3.9, the new update was dubbed 3.9.1.

86-Pack (August 10, 2012)

After a Winter (Australia) break, the June and July Search Quality Highlights were rolled out in one mega-post. Major updates included Panda data and algorithm refreshes, an improved rank-ordering function, a ranking boost for ‘trusted sources’, and changes to site clustering.

DMCA Penalty (‘Pirate’) (August 10, 2012)

Google announced that they would start penalising sites with repeat copyright violations, via Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests.

Panda 3.9 (#17) (July 24, 2012)

A month after Panda 3.8, Google rolled out a new Panda update. Google stated about 1% of search queries were impacted.

Panda 3.8 (#16) (June 25, 2012)

Google rolled out another Panda data refresh, data only, no algorithm changes and had a much smaller impact than Panda 3.7.

Panda 3.7 (#15) (June 8, 2012)

Google rolled out yet another Panda data update, claiming that less than 1% of search queries were affect. Ranking fluctuation data suggested that the impact was substantially higher than previous Panda updates.

39-Pack (June 7, 2012)

Google released their monthly Search Highlights, with 39 updates in May. Major changes included Penguin improvements, better link-scheme detection, changes to title/snippet rewriting, and updates to Google News.

Penguin 1.1 (#2) (May 25, 2012)

Google rolled out its first targeted data update after the Penguin’ algorithm update. This confirmed that Penguin data was being processed outside of the main search index, much like Panda data.

Knowledge Graph (May 16, 2012)

In a major step toward semantic search, Google started rolling out ‘Knowledge Graph’, a SERP integrated display providing supplemental object about certain people, places, and things. ‘knowledge panels’ will start to appear on more SERPs over time.

52-Pack (May 4, 2012)

Google published details of 52 updates in April, including changes that were tied to the ‘Penguin update’. Other highlights included a 15% larger ‘base’ index, improved pagination handling, and many updates to how sitelinks are measured.

Panda 3.6 (#14) (April 27, 2012)

8 days after Panda 3.5, Google rolled out yet another Panda data update. The impact was negligible.

Penguin (April 24, 2012)

After weeks of speculation about an ‘Over optimisation penalty’, Google finally rolled out the ‘Webspam Update’, which was soon after dubbed ‘Penguin’. Penguin adjusted a number of spam factors, including keyword stuffing, and impacted an estimated 3.1% of English queries.

Panda 3.5 (#13) (April 19, 2012)

Google updates ‘Panda’ with minimal impact noticed.

Parked Domain Bug (April 16, 2012)

After a number of webmasters reported ranking shuffles, Google confirmed that a data error had caused some domains to be mistakenly treated as parked domains.

50-Pack (April 3, 2012)

Google posted another batch of update highlights, covering 50 changes in March. These included confirmation of Panda 3.4, changes to anchor-text ‘scoring’, updates to image search, and changes to how search queries with local intent are interpreted.

Panda 3.4 (#12) (March 23, 2012)

Google announced another Panda update, this time via Twitter as the update was rolling out. Their public statements estimated that Panda 3.4 impacted about 1.6% of search results.

Venice (February 27, 2012)

As part of their monthly update, Google mentioned code-name ‘Venice’. This local update appeared to more aggressively localise organic results and more tightly integrate local search data.

40-Pack (2) (February 27, 2012)

Google published a second set of ‘search quality highlights’ at the end of the month, claiming more than 40 changes in February. Notable changes included multiple ‘Image Search’ updates, multiple freshness updates (including phasing out 2 old bits of the algorithm), plus a Panda update.

Panda 3.3 (#11) (February 27, 2012)

just 3 days after the 1 year anniversary of ‘Panda’, an unprecedented lifespan for a named update, Google rolled out another update, which was relatively minor.

17-Pack (February 3, 2012)

Google released another round of ‘search quality highlights’ (17 in all). Many related to speed, freshness, and spell-checking, but one major announcement was tighter integration of Panda into the main search index.

Ads Above The Fold (January 19, 2012)

Google updated their page layout algorithms to devalue websites with too much ad content on the first page (before scrolling, i.e. ‘above the fold’).

Panda 3.2 (#10) (January 18, 2012)

Google confirmed a Panda data update, although suggested that the algorithm hadn’t changed.

Search + Your World (January 10, 2012)

Google announced a radical shift in personalisation, aggressively pushing Google+ social data and user profiles into SERPs. Google also added a new, prominent toggle button to shut off personalisation.

30-Pack (January 5, 2012)

Google announced 30 changes over the previous month, including image search landing-page quality detection, more relevant site-links, more rich snippets, and related-query improvements.

10-Pack (December 1, 2011)

Google outlined a second set of 10 updates, announcing that these posts would come every month. Updates included related query refinements, parked domain detection, blog search freshness, and image search freshness.

Panda 3.1 (#9) (November 18, 2011)

After Panda 2.5, Google entered a period of ‘Panda Flux’ where updates would happen more frequently and would be relatively minor.

10-Pack of Updates (November 14, 2011)

In an attempt to be more transparent, Matt Cutts released a post with 10 recent algorithm updates.

Freshness Update (November 3, 2011)

Google announced that an algorithm change rewarding freshness would impact up to 35% of search queries. This update primarly affected time-sensitive results, but signalled a much stronger focus on newer content.

Query Encryption (October 18, 2011)

Google announced they would be encrypting search queries for privacy reasons, however, this disrupted organic keyword referral data, returning ‘(not provided)’ for some organic results, increasing in the weeks following the launch.

Panda “Flux” (#8) (October 5, 2011)

Matt Cutts tweeted: ‘expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks’ and gave a figure of about 2%.

Panda 2.5 (#7) (September 28, 2011)

After more than month, Google rolled out another Panda update.

516 Algorithm Updates (September 21, 2011)

This wasn’t an update, but it was an amazing revelation. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that Google made 516 updates in 2010. The reality of experimentation was even more shocking because Google tested over 13,000 updates.

Pagination Elements (September 15, 2011)

To help fix crawl and duplication problems created by pagination, Google introduced the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link markup attributes. The search giant also announced that they had improved automatic consolidation and canonicalization for ‘View All’ pages.

Read ‘Pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev”‘ for Google’s explanation and how to integrate the markup.

Expanded Sitelinks (August 16, 2011)

After experimenting for a while, Google officially rolled out expanded site-links, most often for brand queries. At first, these were 12-packs, but Google appeared to limit the expanded site-links to 6 shortly after the roll-out.

Read ‘Introducing new and improved sitelinks’ for Google’s explanation of how they’ve improved sitelinks.

Panda 2.4 (#6) (August 12, 2011)

Google rolled Panda out internationally, both for English-language queries globally and non-English queries except for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Google reported that this impacted 6-9% of search queries.

Google+ (June 28, 2011)

After a number of social media attempts, Google launched a serious attack on Facebook with Google+. Google+ revolved around circles for sharing content, and was tightly integrated into products like Gmail. Within 2 weeks Google+ reached 10M users.

Panda 2.2 (#4) (June 21, 2011)

Google continued to update Panda-impacted sites and data, and version 2.2 was officially acknowledged.

Schema.org (June 2, 2011)

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft jointly announced support for a consolidated approach to structured data. They also created a number of new ‘schemas’ in an apparent bid to move toward even richer search results.

Read ‘Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web’ for Google’s explaination of how this allows search engines to better understand websites.

Panda 2.1 (#3) (May 9, 2011)

Initially dubbed ‘Panda 3.0’, Google appeared to roll out yet another round of changes. These changes were minor.

Panda 2.0 (#2) (April 11, 2011)

Google rolled out the Panda update to all English queries worldwide (not limited to English-speaking countries). New signals were also integrated, including data about sites users blocked via the SERPs directly or the Chrome browser.

The +1 Button (March 30, 2011)

Responding to competition from established social media sites including Facebook and Twitter, Google launched the +1 button next to results links. Clicking allowed users to influence search results within their social circle, across both organic and paid results.

Panda/Farmer (February 23, 2011)

A major algorithm update hit sites hard, affecting up to 12% of search results according to Google. Panda came down hard on thin content websites and their pages, content farms, websites with high ad-to-content ratios, and a number of other quality issues. Panda rolled out over a couple of months.

Attribution Update (January 28, 2011)

In response to high-profile spam cases, Google rolled out an update to help better sort out content attribution and stop scrapers. According to Matt Cutts, this affected about 2% of queries.

Negative Reviews (December 1, 2010)

After an expose in the New York Times about how an e-commerce site was ranking based on negative reviews, Google made a rare move and reactively adjusted the algorithm to target sites using similar tactics.

Read ‘Being bad to your customers is bad for business’ for Google’s explanation of what happened and how they responded.

Instant Previews (November 1, 2010)

A magnifying glass icon appeared on Google search results, allowing search visitors to quickly view a preview of landing pages directly from SERPs. This signalled a renewed focus for Google on landing page quality, design, and usability.

Google Instant (September 1, 2010)

Expanding on Google Suggest which shows 5 popular search queries changing as you continue typing, Google Instant launched, displaying search results as a query was being typed based on popular previous searches.

Caffeine (Rollout) (June 1, 2010)

After much testing, Google finished rolling out the Caffeine infrastructure. Caffeine not only boosted Google’s SERP return speed, but integrated crawling and indexation better, resulting in a 50% fresher index, taking into account newer webpages.

May Day (May 1, 2010)

Matt Cutts confirmed that May Day was an algorithm change impacting long-tail URLs that were senseless. Ecommerce websites with large-scale thin content were hit especially hard.

Long-Tail keywords, especially those with three and four word phrases have the highest conversion rate. They are the most profitable and lucrative keywords in Ecommerce.

The update was aimed at improving the quality of search results with the ‘quality’ of a page evaluated for multi-word search queries. Put simply, do the words in the URL appear within the content or relate to the context of the content sufficiently to be relevant.

Google Places (April 1, 2010)

Although ‘Places’ pages were rolled out in September 2009, they were originally only a part of Google Maps. The official launch of Google Places re-branded the Local Business Center, integrated Places pages more closely with local search results, and added a number of features, including new local advertising options, a boom for Google revenue.

Real-time Search (December 1, 2009)

Twitter feeds, Google News, newly indexed content, and a number of other sources were integrated into a real-time feed on some SERPs to increase the ‘freshness’ of results.

Rel-canonical Tag (February 1, 2009)

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo jointly announced support for the Canonical Tag, allowing webmasters to send canonicalization signals to search bots without impacting human visitors.

A canonical tag (aka rel=”canonical”) is a way of letting search engines know that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs.

Read ‘Consolidate duplicate URLs’ for more detail on how and why Google incorporated this change.

Google Suggest (August 1, 2008)

In a major change to their logo and home-page appearance, Google introduced ‘Suggest’, displaying suggested searches, (based on previous search queries using the same or similar string of characters) in a dropdown below the search box as visitors typed their search query.

Universal Search (May 16, 2007)

While not your typical algorithm update, Google integrated traditional search results with News, Video, Images, Local, and other verticals, dramatically changing their format. The basic 10-listing SERP returned was officially dead.

Read ‘Taking advantage of universal search’ for more detail on how and why Google has incorporated this change.

Google Local/Maps (October 1, 2005)

After launching ‘Local Business Center’ in March and strongly encouraging businesses to update their information (Google exists off the back of Websites content), Google merged its Maps data into the Local Business Center.

Jagger (October 1, 2005)

Google released a series of updates, mostly targeting spam, pages with low-quality links, including reciprocal links, link farms, and paid links.

XML Sitemaps (June 1, 2005)

Google allowed webmasters to submit XML sitemaps via Webmaster Tools, bypassing traditional HTML sitemaps, and giving SEO experts direct, but minor influence over crawling and indexation.

Personalised Search (June 1, 2005)

Unlike previous attempts at personalisation, which required custom settings and profiles, the 2005 roll-out of personalised search tapped directly into users’ search histories to automatically bias results based on search history.
Although the impact was initially small, Google would go on to use search history for many applications.

Bourbon (May 1, 2005)

“GoogleGuy” (Matt Cutts) announced that Google was rolling out “something like 3.5 changes in search quality. It wasn’t explained, but the 0.5 likely referred to a tweak rather than a change. Webmaster World members speculated that the Bourbon update changed how duplicate content and non-canonical (www vs. non-www) URLs were treated.

Nofollow (January 1, 2005)

To combat spam and control outbound link quality, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft collectively introduce the ‘nofollow’ attribute. Nofollow helps clean up un-vouched for links, including spammy blog comments. While not a traditional algorithm update, this change gradually has a significant impact on the link graph.
Links could now be given, but Google wouldn’t give any weight to the resultant page and the page the link is on would not lose any value as a result of the link.

Brandy (February 1, 2004)

Google rolled out a variety of changes, including a massive index expansion, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), increased attention to anchor text relevance, and the concept of link ‘neighbourhoods’. LSI expanded Google’s ability to understand synonyms and took keyword analysis to the next level.

Florida (November 1, 2003)

This was the update that put updates on the map and many webmasters using bad techniques and methods were out of business. Many sites lost ranking, and business owners were furious. ‘Florida’ sounded the death nail for low-value late 90s SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, and made the game a whole lot more interesting.

Fritz (July 1, 2003)

The monthly ‘Google Dance’ finally came to an end with the ‘Fritz’ update. Instead of completely overhauling the index on a roughly monthly basis, Google switched to an incremental approach. The index was now changing daily.
In fact Google stated that daily updates, even bi-daily updates would be common place.

Boston (February 1, 2003)

Announced at SES Boston, this was the first named Google update. Originally, Google aimed at a major monthly update, so the first few updates were a combination of algorithm changes and major index refreshes (the so-called ‘Google Dance’). As updates became more frequent, the monthly idea quickly died.

1st Documented Update (September 1, 2002)

Before ‘Boston’ (the first Google named update), there was a major upheaval in 2002. The details are unclear because the update was not confirmed, but this appeared to be more than the monthly Google Dance and PageRank update. So horrific it caused people to cry on blogs claiming PageRank was dead. Websites that had PR6 went to PR0 overnight.

Google Toolbar (December 1, 2000)

Guaranteeing SEO manipulation for the next 16 years, Google launched their browser toolbar, and along with it, Toolbar PageRank (TBPR). As soon as webmasters started seeing TBPR, the Google Dance began with people in mass looking for ways to increase a websites PR, especially with regards to inbound links.

While PageRank always has been, & always will be an integral part of the Google algorithm they officially decided on April 15, 2016 to turn off display of PageRank Data in Google Toolbar.

The ultimate prize, a webmasters goal is to rank number 1 on the search engine results page (SERP), the actual result returned by a search engine’s algorithm in response to a keyword query submitted by a user.