The Ultimate Timeline of Google Algorithm Updates (+ Recommendations)

Google is a fickle beast. Many businesses rely on their search engine for traffic, leads, and customers, so Google updates can break or boost a company’s success.

Google’s search engine is ever-changing. It’s the number one search engine in the world because it prioritizes user experience. This means that every one of the latest Google algorithm updates aims to meet its users’ needs and deliver the best possible results.

And as important as this search engine is, no one knows how the Google algorithm works (except for the Google search-quality team, of course).

In this guide, we’ve covered everything you need to know about the Google algorithm. We talk about essential updates throughout their history, and how your company can boost your search results.

Keep reading, or jump to the section you’re looking for.

While the exact number isn’t certain, SEOs believe there are certain ranking signals that Google considers when displaying results. These include factors like keyword usage, domain history, site usability, and more.

This is why, as businesses and marketers, we must optimize our on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO to make it easier for our pages to rank and so consumers can find our content.

Did you know people make over 4.7 billion Google searches every day? The search engine is by far the most popular among its competitors, which means the vast majority of your audience (and potential audience) is actively searching Google for information your website or blog can deliver.

How can you ensure your content ranks high enough on the SERPs to get your audience’s attention? By adhering to the latest Google algorithm updates.

Google Updates 2022

This update aims to improve the user experience. The goal of this content update is to increase the visibility of original helpful content in the search results. At the same time, it limits the results of content created solely to rank well on search engines.

Resources to help with the latest Google update:

Core Update (May 25, 2022)

Core updates are general updates. Their purpose is to make search results more useful and correct. This is a constant process because of changes in current events and the way people use the web.

Google makes thousands of updates to its search algorithm each year. They confirm core updates because these updates usually have some impact on search results. Some users notice changes within 24 hours of an update. Read here to learn more about core updates.

Most core updates address issues of quality and relevancy. This is the most recent core update, but the list below includes past core updates:

• Core Update (November 17, 2021)
• Core Update (July 1, 2021)
• Core Algorithm Update (June 2, 2021)
• Core Update (December 3, 2020)
• Core Update (May 4, 2020)
• Core Update (January 13, 2020)
• Core Algorithm Update (September 24, 2019)
• Core Update (June 2, 2019)
• Core Algorithm Update (April 16, 2018)
• Core Algorithm Update (March 9, 2018)

Product Algorithm Update (March 23, 2022)

This was the latest product review update. This update makes it easier to find high-quality reviews through search. Google’s team shared the reasoning behind these updates, “We’ve regularly heard through user feedback that people prefer detailed reviews with evidence of products actually being tested.”

For more details on product updates, see Product Reviews Update (April 8, 2021). There was also a product review update on December 1, 2021.

Page Experience Update (February 22, 2022)

This is the latest google update for page experience on desktop devices. For more on-page experience updates, see Page Experience Update (June 15, 2021).

Resources to help with the latest Google algorithm updates:

Google Updates 2021

This was an update to the way that the search engine finds and displays local search results.

Google Spam Update (November 3, 2021)

The spam updates helped the search engine recognize and filter out websites that:

• Contain harmful or questionable content
• Don’t add value
• Use black hat SEO techniques

These updates help protect users from spammy sites and unwanted ads.

Other spam updates include:

• Google Spam Update (November 3, 2021)
• Google Link Spam Algorithm Update (July 26, 2021)

Page Experience Update (June 15, 2021)

This update aims to improve the user experience. It aspires to give priority to web pages with quick load times that stay stable as users scroll. These links from Google can help you learn more about how you can update your site for a better page experience.

Known Victims Protection (June 10, 2021)

For years, sites have attacked individuals with false, offensive, or damaging content. These sites are sometimes the top search result for these individuals. As a result, websites that post explicit images, mug shots, and other slanders often profit by charging victims to remove this content.

With this update, individuals can report these offending sites to Google. Then the search engine will lower the ranking for these searches.

Google Updates 2020

Google Updates 2019

The Google BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) update was an effort by Google to better understand the language in which people search. It’s like RankBrain and is an extra effort to understand searches; it didn’t replace it.

BERT was a significant search algorithm update. As reported by Google: “With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding … we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

In short, BERT helps Google users find useful and accurate information. The update allows Google to capture more of the nuance and context in queries and not lean so heavily on the use of prepositions or phrasing to clarify questions. (Check out some live examples of BERT here.)

BERT was also applied to featured snippets in over two dozen countries and languages.

Featured Snippets Update (August 1, 2019)

This update aimed to improve featured snippets. It was an update to surface snippets that would be better with frequent refreshes. It also helped to remove outdated snippets.

These three examples from Google can make it clear what snippets were the target of this update:

• Regularly updated information, like a blog with new posts each week
• Time-based information, like events or TV programming
• News and current events

Core Update, also called Florida 2 (March 12, 2019)

This was a big core update. SEO experts didn’t notice anything unique about this core update, but its timing and scale prompted its alternate name.

Google Updates 2018

Here’s how Google explains: “[Historically,] our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.”

Core Algorithm Update (March 9, 2018)

Google put out this core update to better judge which sites were relevant for specific queries. This update was to help improve rankings for sites with useful content.

Google Updates 2017

The Fred update targeted thin, ad-focused content. It used data from quality raters at Google to cut low-quality results from SERPs.

Intrusive Interstitials Update (January 10, 2017)

Technical SEO defines interstitials as “content that gets between the user and the content they’re looking for.” This might include:

• Popups that mask other page content
• Web pages that users need to dismiss to access content
• Website layouts with interstitials above the fold

This Google update lowered the rankings of websites with mobile pages that had intrusive interstitials. This update did not penalize interstitials for cookies, legal verification, logins, or banners.

Google Updates 2015

Mobilegeddon was another effort to provide the best possible search experience for users. Google said at the time of release, “When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps.”

Mobilegeddon initially penalized websites that weren’t mobile-responsive and rewarded those that were. Google moved to mobile-first indexing in 2019, so the mobile-friendliness of your site now impacts how you rank for every query.

Pigeon treats local search the same as traditional organic search, just with local cues. It considers searcher location when displaying SERP results, and allows searchers to treat Google Search and Google Maps the same. For example, you can search “best accountant near me” in both engines, and the results should be similar.

Google Updates 2013

The Knowledge Graph came out a year before, but Hummingbird improved upon this feature.

Hummingbird uses natural language processing that includes semantic indexing, synonyms, and other features to interpret queries and produce results. It weeds out keyword-stuffed, low-quality content to create a more personalized, exact search process and show SERP results that matched searcher intent.

Payday Loan Update (June 11, 2013)

The goal of the Payday Loan Update was to find and further lessen the impact of spammy queries and websites. It had a bigger impact in countries where webspam was more common.

Spammy sites are those that:

Other updates like this one include:

• Payday Loan Update 3.0 June 12, 2014
• Payday Loan Update 2.0 May 16, 2014

Google Updates 2012

The Google Penguin Update was released to combat black-hat link-building techniques, such as spammy links, link directories, and keyword-stuffed anchor text.

Google calls them “black hat web spam” and defines them as “techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked.”

Prior to the Penguin Update, link volume — regardless of quality — was a heavy influence on how pages ranked on the SERPs. Penguin attempts to better understand how websites were earning their links. It also made sure that only high-quality trustworthy links were rewarding the sites they led to.

Google Penguin only affects inbound links — the links leading to a site, not away from it. Penguin monitors for black-hat link-building techniques and over-optimized anchor link text. This is when too many inbound links for one website contain the same anchor text, which can alert Google that the links aren’t natural or earned.

Other Penguin updates include:

• Penguin Update 3.0 (October 17, 2014)
• Penguin Update 2.1 (October 4, 2013)
• Penguin Update 2.0 (May 22, 2013)
• Penguin Update 1.2 (October 5, 2012)

Penguin was also added to the core algorithm in late 2016.

Exact Match Domain Update (September 28, 2012)

This update targeted websites with domains that exactly matched competitive keywords. Some sites used this practice to improve their search placement but had poor quality or thin content. This update lowered the value of these sites dramatically.

Venice Update (February 27, 2012)

This update pulled search results based on the user’s IP address or physical location. It also increased Google Maps (then Google Places) appearances in organic search results. This made it easier for users to search for local resources online.

Panda was originally introduced as a filter for search engine results, but in January 2016, it was added to the core algorithm.

Google Updates 2010

Caffeine was a new system for indexing the web that made it more efficient to crawl and store data. This update also improved the freshness of search results.

Google developers shared at the time of release, “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.”

Google Updates 2009

A famous quote for this update from Google’s then-CEO, Eric Schmidt, is “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

Google Updates 2005

The Bigdaddy update aligned with an upgrade to Google’s data center. It aimed to improve the quality and technical issues for improved search results. It also filtered out some websites with spammy practices like unnatural link building.

Jagger Update (September 1, 2005)

This update expanded the options for search to new documents and file types. Google’s main crawler at the time was Googlebot, and with this update, it expanded the way it scanned sites.

The Jagger update also looked at link quality. It penalized sites with:

• Paid backlinks
• Unnatural link building
• Linking schemes
• Scraped content

Google Updates 2003

This update was especially hard for these sites because it launched during the holiday season. This timing directly influences annual sales in retail.

How to Prepare Your Site for the Latest Google Updates

• Focus on creating genuinely unique content that provides value to your visitors and customers. Google provides 20+ questions to help you determine quality and value.
• Use a site crawler like Botify or Screaming Frog to identify thin content on your website and blog. If you find any, consider combining or archiving those pages.
• Remove or rework any low-quality or underperforming content. (You can identify this content based on low traffic and/or low conversion rates.)
• Avoid writing for machines and create conceptual content, not just keyword-driven content. Expand your keyword research to include different phrasing, commonly asked questions, and similar terms.
• Conduct competitive analysis by searching your keywords on a new Google SERP and see what related content and SERP features (like Knowledge Graphs or featured snippets) pop up.
• Consistently update your content to reflect better grammar, syntax, and language.

2. Check your technical SEO.

• Make sure to use structured data and metadata on both your desktop and mobile versions.
• Rewrite duplicate content. Ecommerce sites are especially vulnerable to duplicative content. In these cases, use canonical URLs to show Google which version of each page to rank in the SERPs.
• Make sure your off-page SEO and technical SEO are intact and that there are no underlying issues.

3. Create a great mobile experience.

• Confirm your website is mobile-optimized. Here’s a blog post on how to do this.
• Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to see how your website performs. This tool will show you how your site looks on a mobile device and alert you to any loading or processing problems.
• If you have separate URLs for your mobile site (an m-dot site), confirm that your mobile page reflects the same content as your desktop site. (Google prefers to index your mobile URL.)
• Read through Google’s best practices for mobile-first indexing.

4. Build quality backlinks.

• Follow white-hat link-building techniques to build high-quality, relevant backlinks.
• Don’t take part in Private Blog Network (PBN) link schemes, which often lead to site penalties.
• If you hire an agency or freelancer for link-building, make sure you ask how they’re building links. There should be no exchange of money between the agency and the person or organization linking to your site.

5. Think locally.

• Leverage on-page SEO and other tactics to ensure Google recognizes your business’s location and other local ranking factors.
• Create content and media that associates your business with a specific location, such as a neighborhood, town, or city. This will help improve your local SEO.
• Register with Google My Business to manage how your business information appears on Google SERPs. Create and manage profiles on other important directories. Check out this post for a full list of online business directories.
• Make sure your location information is consistent across all your web properties, like your website, social media, and Yelp listings.

Grow Better with Google Updates

As a business owner and marketer, the latest Google updates may seem like a lot of detail and work. You’re not wrong. These updates and the changes you might need to make can be overwhelming.

But it’s important to remember that Google wants to create a fantastic user experience, just like you do. These algorithm updates prune out lazy, low-quality, and illegal content. That content isn’t just filling up your search queries, it’s competing with your business and marketing content.

In short, these Google updates are good things. It’s up to you to keep learning and use them to your advantage.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.