Google algorithm update history

Around 80% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. For those ads to be shown, people must come to Google and for people to come to Google, it needs to show highly relevant results against the user search queries. In order to provide the best search experience possible, Google (and all other search engines) constantly make adjustments to their algorithm.

Algorithm changes can be grouped into three categories:

1. Algorithm Update. This involves the modification of specific signals within an existing algorithm by the search engine.
2. Algorithm Refresh. The search engine re-executes a pre-existing algorithm using the same signals as in the previous iteration.
3. New Algorithm. A search engine introduces an entirely new algorithm aimed at enhancing the quality of search results.

Aside from understanding what to optimize a website against, it's also important to monitor the roll-out of new algorithm updates, as they might be the reason behind the fluctuations in ranking (and traffic) and not because of some issues with the website. This knowledge can save countless hours of false work trying to find issues on the site or off-site, that don't exist.

Changes to the algorithms happen all the time - some are announced and some take place in the background. Below is a list of main non-core Google's algorithm updates to look into, to better understand how Google has progressed over time, what challenged it's facing and towards what directions it is moving.

Jump to the update you're interested in via the link below or scroll from bottom up to see how Google's ranking algorithm has evolved over time.

1. AI Overviews May, 2024
2. Site Reputation Abuse May, 2024
3. Helpful Content (HCU) Aug, 2022
4. Vicinity Nov, 2021
5. Google Spam Nov, 2021
6. Page Experience Jun, 2021
7. Known Victims Protection Jun, 2021
8. Product Reviews Apr, 2021
9. Passage Feb, 2021
10. BERT Oct, 2019

11. Mobile-First Mar, 2018
12. Fred Mar, 2017
13. Intrusive Interstitials Jan, 2017
14. RankBrain Oct, 2015
15. Mobilegeddon Apr, 2015
16. Pigeon Jul, 2014
17. Hummingbird Sep, 2013
18. Payday Loan Jun, 2013
19. Page Layout Jan, 2012
20. Exact Match Domain Sep, 2012

21. Penguin Apr, 2012
22. Venice Feb, 2012
23. Freshness Nov, 2011
24. Panda Feb, 2011
25. Caffeine Aug, 2009
26. Vince Jan, 2009
27. Universal search May, 2007
28. Jagger Sep, 2005
29. Florida Nov, 2003

The AI Overviews Update marked a significant advancement in search technology by leveraging artificial intelligence to generate concise, informative summaries of content, providing users with quick and relevant overviews directly in the search results.

There was a lot of examples of this generating really bad and dangerous results, especially in the YMYL vertical, after which it was rolled back, but it does show the direction in which search engines are going.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

This update focuses on identifying and demoting websites that engage in practices designed to falsely inflate their reputation and authority.

This was carried out by manual actions that was promised to be continued by algorithmic ones in the near future.

A lot of large brands started removing or blocking Google from accessing (and indexing) large portions of their site in anticipation of this update.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

The Helpful Content Update (HCU) was designed to elevate content that genuinely aids users while demoting content created primarily for search engine optimization purposes.

This update notably influenced travel publishers. The travel industry, often saturated with keyword-stuffed and superficial content, saw a shift as the update favored comprehensive, engaging, and authentic travel guides, reviews, and articles.

For digital marketers and SEO professionals, the Helpful Content Update underscores the importance of creating content with the user's needs in mind. This involves conducting thorough research, providing original insights, and ensuring that the content is both engaging and useful.

In 2023 there was another HCU update that had major implications such as:

• Enhanced detection of content that is unoriginal, AI-generated without proper oversight, or written primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to inform or engage the audience.
• If you're hosting 3rd party content on your site that is different to your main site - it should be blocked from being indexed by Google. This of sub-domains with
• For content to be considered "fresh" again, it has to be updated considerably and changing a few words or simply changing the date won't make it so.

More about the update: Google Search Central.

The Vicinity update was a change in Google's local search algorithm, aiming to improve the relevance and accuracy of local search results. This update placed a stronger emphasis on the proximity of businesses to the searcher, ensuring that users are more likely to see businesses that are physically closer to their location.

This update underscores the importance to ensure accurate and consistent business information across all platforms, leveraging local keywords, and encouraging customer reviews.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

The Google Spam Update focused on detecting and demoting websites that engage in practices such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and the use of automatically generated content.

This update was designed to enhance the search experience by reducing the prevalence of low-quality and spammy results.

Variations of a spam update was rolled out multiple times thereafter

• Oct, 2022
• Dec, 2022
• Oct, 2023
• Mar, 2024
• Jun, 2024

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

The Page Experience Update highlights the importance of factors such as mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS security, and the absence of intrusive interstitials. These elements, combined with Core Web Vitals, form a comprehensive assessment of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page.

By prioritizing these aspects, Google aims to reward websites that offer a seamless and enjoyable browsing experience.

More about the update: Google Search Central.

The Known Victims Protection Update was a significant step by Google to combat slanderous and exploitative content that targets individuals. This update specifically addressed the issue of malicious websites that post harmful content about people, often demanding payment to remove the damaging information.

This update enhanced Google's ability to identify and demote websites that engage in these harmful activities.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

This update encourages content creators to focus on quality over quantity. High-quality reviews that share unique information, personal experiences, and thoughtful comparisons are more likely to be favored by Google's algorithms.

This shift underscores the importance of authenticity and thoroughness in review content, prompting a move away from thin, superficial reviews.

More about the update: Google Search Central.

The Google Passage Update was designed to improve how Google understands and ranks individual passages of content within a larger page. This update is particularly beneficial for pages with extensive information, ensuring that even if a particular passage is buried deep within the content, it can still be surfaced if it directly answers a user's query.

This was another signal for a need to emphasize clear headings, subheadings, and clearly organize content to aid in optimizing for passage indexing.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

Building on top of the success of the Hummingbird and RankBrain updates and embracing the latest technology developments, Google rolled this update that enabled Google even better understand the intent behind what the user is trying to achieve with the search.

Although there were many myths surrounding this update, there was no action one could take as it wasn't about promoting or demoting websites - only about better matching search queries with the most relevant content. For sites that saw fluctuations in rankings, it was important to check if the content was clear and didn't confuse the new algorithm.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

This was a major change as the primary index was now being generated by a mobile user agent.

For websites that already had responsive design implemented and had a good load-time, this update didn't change much and any gains were achieved as a result of sub-par performance of the competitors websites.

This was not a surprise and Google had communicated for a long time that this will happen so businesses had plenty of time to prepare.

To truly understand how big of task that was for Google, it completed mobile first indexing only in Oct, 2023.

More about the update: Google Search Central.

The focus of this update was content quality.

There isn't much known about this update - only that it targeted sites with thin content, typically with affiliate links - websites without a "real" business around them - only to rank for specific terms and "push" people to click on ads or links.

There were businesses that saw up to 90% of their organic traffic from Google disappear.

The name of the update is an SEO industry joke, as when asked about the name of the update, that time Google's representative Gary Illyes jokes that all unnamed Google updates should be called Fred and the name stuck.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

Similar as with the Page Layout update, this algorithm update targeted websites that provide sub-optimal user experience by showing interstitial message - on-screen pop-ups.

Although some would be smart and make them appear with a significant time delay or as users are about to scroll to the bottom of the page, many had implemented in a way that they would appear immediately once the page is loaded.

If typical algorithm update would mean that rankings of a website would increase or decrease, this update came with a penalty, further more indicating that one shouldn't sacrifice user experience for some business objectives.

More about the update: Search Engine Land.

Continuing the move, first strengthened by the Hummingbird update, the rolling out of RankBrain - a machine learning system - Google was further developing their capability into better understanding search queries and thus being better able to match them with the most relevant search result possible.

It impacts all searches.

This update was another signal of Google's algorithm maturing and confidence that one doesn't have to optimize content specifically for Google and as long as it's written on a high-quality level, it will understand it.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

With more and more users accessing web from mobile devices rather than desktop devices (from Oct 2016 onwards more people accessed web from mobile than desktop devices), in order to ensure good user experience, it became important for the website to be mobile-friendly. There were two ways how most companies went about this - creating separate website (one for desktop and one for mobile) or creating one website, but with responsive design.

Website that provided a good user experience on mobile devices, saw a boost in organic rankings for non-branded terms.

This was a pre-cursor for the upcoming mobile first update that would take place in 2018.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

Similar as with the Venice update, the focus of this update was local search. If Vince update looked at the well established brands as a vector to quality and trust, then for local search this update looked to adjust that so that local business with strong on-line presence can appear in top positions in organic search.

This update also positively impacted consumer content driven local directories such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, Home Advisor and similar.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

This is an algorithm update that everyone should know about. According to Google, it was the biggest update since 2001 and was a complete rewrite of the core algorithm and affected 90% of all searches.

The focus of the update was to ensure better matching between queries and the pages, especially ones that have more keywords in them.

It was the first major move away from "string" to "things" - Google look at the search query and breaking it down into entities and then making sense of them, instead of just looking at a string of text.

If the old algorithm was trying to match keywords to landing pages, then the new algorithm better understood what is the intent behind the queries and then matched that to the most appropriate landing pages.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

If most updates affected websites irrespective of the industry, then this update was targeting heavily spammed sites operating in industries such as: high interest loans, payday loans, porn, pharmaceuticals, gambling, sports betting, mortgages, insurance and similar.

Since each market is different in terms of size, financial incentives and quality - the update affected 0.3% websites in the U.S. market and as high as 4% in the Turkish market.

This update was re-introduced two more times the year after the first update:

• Payday loan 2.0 May 16, 2014
• Payday loan 3.0 Jun 12, 2014

The last update included also the protection against negative SEO.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

As a continuous effort from Google to ensure that, when users click on the search results, they get a great user experience, Google rolled this update that targeted websites that had too much advertisement above the fold which means that users didn't have a choice but to scroll to see that content they were planning to see.

This update affected less than 1% of websites.

It also was a loud signal to the business, that Google doesn't want the website commercial objectives to come at a cost of bad user experience.

This update was re-introduced multiple times on:

• Jan 19, 2012
• Oct 9, 2012
• Feb 6, 2014
• Nov 1, 2016

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

This updates targeted exact match domains or EMD for short, which means that people would create a domain buyflowersinlondon.com that would exactly match the term they intend to rank for - in this case - "buy flowers in london". Already before this update, this was considered a gray hat SEO tactic (between white hat and black hat) and wasn't considered a sustainable approach.

This update pre-dominantly affected low quality sites that had little (valuable) content and thus didn't provide users with great user experience.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

This Google's update is focused on combating poor quality external incoming links. Together with Panda update, it is one of the most important updates in Google's algorithm.

According to Google, it ignores most of the poor quality links, yet as reality shows, websites can get a heavy penalty, by participating in link schemes such as Private Blog Networks (PBNs), paying for links or other unnatural link practices.

As with Panda update, it was rolled out multiple times:

• Penguin 1.2 Oct 5, 2012
• Penguin 2.0 May 22, 2013
• Penguin 2.1 Oct 4, 2013
• Penguin 3.0 Oct 17, 2014
• Penguin 4.0 Sep 23, 2016

With the last update it become part of the Google core algorithm.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

During the month of February of 2012, Google rolled out 40 different algorithm updates. One of which was called Venice. This algorithm introduced the use of user's IP address to serve information that is in close proximity, geographically speaking, to the user's location.

For example if user is searching for the word dentist or dentist near me then Google would should dental practices around the area where the IP address is issues to.

As with the universal search update, this allowed Google to show listings from local search with higher degree of relevance without user having to type in specific location.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

It was a major update that affected how webpages are being ranked and according to Google impacted 35% of search queries.

The Caffeine update enabled Google to faster find, index and surface content. With this Freshness update Google pushed it a step further and added time as a relevance measure for search queries, that can be grouped into three categories:

1. Recent events. These are queries that are currently trending, often for events that are currently unfolding. Example: announcement of a new James Bond actor.

2. Regularly recurring events. Examples: elections, TV shows, sports games.
3. Frequent updates. Example: new iPad model announced by Apple.

This is not the first time when Google has introduced time-related ranking factors. Back in 2007 one of Google's engineers mentioned Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) algorithm that tries to predict if, for the query users has typed into Google, he wants or doesn't want fresh results.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

One of the drawbacks of the faster indexation brought by the Caffeine update, was a quicker feedback loop for marketers who were more interested in making profit and less about providing high quality to the users.

Two companies in particular stood out - Demand media and Answers.com. The former at one point was able to publish 7000 articles per day. Content was of low quality, with search engine as their primary audience and was procured via a wide network of freelancers.

This caused a headache to Google as the search results were full of low quality results leading to suboptimal user experience. This update was a response to that and its main focus was evaluation of content quality and user experience and it impacted around 11.8% of queries.

Google also started using quality raters - people assigned to evaluate content manually. Google also published overall instructions, including 23 questions that one should answer when evaluation the quality of content that can be used a check-list when planning, producing and publishing content.

Panda algorithm was re-introduced multiple times over the years:

• 2011: 9 times
• 2012: 14 times
• 2013: 4 times
• 2014: 2 times
• 2015: 1 time

As part of the 2014 updates Google introduced the E-A-T principle to its search quality guidelines (that later in 2022 was expanded to E-E-A-T principle) to better evaluate the quality of content.

After 2015 Google confirmed that this algorithm has been incorporated into the core Google algorithm.

The name for this algorithm is believed to have come from a Google's engineer's Biswanath Panda surname, who was, most likely, one of the engineers behind this algorithm.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

Although not an algorithm update in it's typical sense of the term as it didn't affect rankings, it was an update that affected how Google was indexes information.

Google's algorithm was originally designed in 1998, when internet was completely different. For context:

• # of websites. 1998: 2.4m; 2009: 238m.
• # of internet users. 1998: 188m; 2009: 1.8b.

And it wasn't just the share volume of websites and internet users that changed - it's also the pace at which the information was being added, modified and removed that changed. Before the update

The old algorithm was designed to group pages into categories based on the perceived freshness with one set of bots coming to see if changes have been made, and the second type of bots coming to fetch the content, meaning that it could take multiple weeks for the content to be updated.

With the new update Google's crawler is able to crawl, collect the data and add to it's index in seconds.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

During this update a lot of well established brands experienced significant improvement in rankings (and traffic) across a wide range of high search volume keywords.

This was a signal as one of the first loud steps where Google uses brand as a vector for authority, trust and relevance.

It's worth putting this in context what that time Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2008 commented on value of brands:

• "The internet is fast becoming a 'cesspool' where false information thrives."
• "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."
• "Branding may be an essential element that helps people navigate the world. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

This was a strong indication that Google is struggling to distinguish quality sites and content and low quality which leads to suboptimal search experience and as a consequence, leads to less money in Google's pockets.

Truth be told - this was a golden age where spammers from the affiliate world would dominate the search results and Google needed a way out. Relying on brands as a sign of trust. This approach was very understandable, but had two major flaws:

• Small companies (brands with fewer brand searches) would suffer and their content often is, if not better, then on par with that of big brands.
• Assumption that big brands would adhere to high quality standards and wouldn't engage in tactics that violates Google's search guidelines.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

For those that haven't seen it, it may be hard to imagine, but before this update "Web search" consisted of only website results. For all other types of Google's search engines (also known as vertical searches) such as Book search, Finance, Images, Local/Maps, News, Products, Video - they were available under under a separate tab in Google.

This update changed all that and all the different types of Google's search engines were integrated into one.

Although this provides richer results, it also went against the original motto under which Google was working - making search easy to use. But with rich functionality always comes complexity.

One of the implications of this update was that savvy marketers understood that prominent positions in Google can be gained not just by optimizing web pages, but also videos, images, local listings and more.

More about the update: Search Engine Land.

This was the second major algorithm update after Florida Update in 2003.

This update included changes in all three main areas of SEO:

1. Content. The big focus was to weed out duplicate content across different or within the same domain, including the implementation of canonical tags. Those who implemented a black hat SEO tactic such as doorway pages saw negative effects on their search engine rankings.
2. Technical. Websites utilizing black hat SEO methods such as hidden text and cloaking were negatively affected.

3. Backlinks. With backlink profile being a serious part of Google's ranking algorithm, many SEO companies offered link building services which often involved black-hat SEO techniques. Google cracked down by introducing weight on link velocity, anchor text and penalized those involved in Private Blog Networks.

This update also brought two discussion points:

1. Domain age. Does Google value older domains (by date first registered) more than younger domains?
2. Domain expiration date. Google filed a patent that stated that length of years domain is paid for in advance shows intent of how serious the organization is about using this domain.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.

Google's Florida Update started being rolled out on November 16, 2003, which significantly affected the rankings of vast amount of websites and was a big shift on how Google assesses links.

Unfortunately, many legitimate sites were caught in the crossfire, experiencing ranking drops and the timing of this couldn't have been worse as this was pre-holiday time and for many businesses this meant that a large part of their yearly revenue was missed and many had to compensate for the sudden drop in organic search by investing heavily in PPC.

Google's representatives were asking (and were provided) with examples of "false positives" and they made an effort to improve their algorithm.

Google made an unofficial promise not to roll out such significant updates before holiday season, however it was not honoured and it happened again with Jagger Update in 2005 and other updates.

More about the update: Search Engine Journal.