How Google Algorithm Updates Can Affect Your Rankings

Each update to Google's algorithm (the way in which it decides how highly a website ranks for a search term) is designed to tackle a specific issue that Google sees as affecting it's search results in a way that it doesn't want. For example, if Google has found that a specific set of websites are ranked more highly than websites it considers to be of greater quality, it may examine what those websites have in common and release an update to place more or less emphasis on a different variable. "The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs," said Google's Matt Cutts. Here's a rundown of Google algorithm updates and how they impact search results:

February 2011 - January 2016: "Panda" Updates

Starting in February 2011, the Panda update was designed to target websites with low quality content, such as dynamically created pages where the only difference was a few keywords, or articles which contain very low quality text. That is, Google wanted to improve the quality of search results it returned and in designing the update used "Quality Raters" to answer such questions as "would I trust this site with my credit card?" when distinguishing between low and high quality websites.

Whilst Google's Matt Cutts said that sites affected by this update "are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings", there is sufficient evidence to show that some legitimate websites such as property portals that can not avoid featuring the same property listings as other websites were heavily penalized. And, according to multiple sources, Google's Panda 4.0 update in May 2014 resulted in some major sites such as eBay seeing a significant drop in rankings, presumably as a result of the automated nature of it's web pages failing to meet Google's quality requirements. To help owners of affected websites, Google released a list of ways in which website owners can make sure that their website is considered to be of a high quality.

In September 2014 Google began rolling out another Panda update - one which Google described as featuring "a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely". According to SearchMetrics, some websites suffered from a drop of up to 79% in their search visibility in the United States as a result of this update.

In late July 2015, Google announced the start of a Panda update that would be rolled-out over several months and which would affect up to 3% of English-language websites. According to Search Engine Land, this update will slowly begin to remove penalties imposed by previous Panda updates, assuming that the owners of those websites have stopped attempting to manipulate their search engine rankings.

In January 2016, Google integrated Panda updates into it's "core" algorithm, signaling that changes in the way they prevent poor-quality websites from ranking well would now happen in an incremental, ongoing basis. This is instead of significant changes to the rankings of many websites occurring simultaneously on the same date.

In October 2016, Gary Illyes of Google told Search Engine Land that the Panda algorithm will analyze all of the pages of a website and may decide to demote it's search engine rankings as a whole, based on the site's overall quality. He said that if Google figured out that a site is successfully "gaming our systems" they would adjust it's rank and "push the site back just to make sure that it's not working anymore".

May 2012 Onwards: "Penguin" Updates

The Penguin update began rolling our in April 2012, and was designed to ensure that websites with artificial incoming links were penalized. Websites that were paying other websites to link to them or were involved in link schemes where vast numbers of reciprocal links were used were heavily punished by this update. According to Google, approximately 3% of search results were affected by this update.

In May 2012, Penguin 1.1 was released. While the original update concentrated on links themselves, this update concentrated on the anchor text used in links. In a scenario where even if both the linking website and the linked-to website were of high quality, and the link was not deemed to be artificial, the linked-to website suffered a drop in search engine rankings if too many of the incoming links used the same anchor text. A great example of affected websites is those operated by web designers, who tend to have many incoming links that contain the same anchor text. This Google update served to devalue such links.

Around the middle of October 2014, Google began releasing another Penguin update which lasted several weeks. Google's Pierre Far confirmed on his Google+ page that this update would give websites that had been penalized by earlier updates a chance to recover their rankings after cleaning up their artificial links (a process called "disavowing"),adding that it would also penalize websites with artificial links that had previously been undiscovered. According to Google, this update would affect less than 1% of English-language search queries.

In December 2014, Google revealed that websites which have been punished for having low-quality incoming links can actually recover from any penalties resulting from Penguin without actually "disavowing" all their poor links. "We look at it on an aggregated level across everything that we have from your website. And if we see that things are picking up and things are going in the right direction, then that's something our algorithms will be able to take into account," said John Mueller on the Google Webmasters YouTube Channel. What this means is that if your website has been punished in the past for having artificial incoming links, even if you have failed to act on them, your rankings in Google will improve if your website starts to feature high-quality incoming links.

Recovering from a Penguin-related penalty, whether by "disavowing" artificial links or increasing the number of high-quality incoming links your website enjoys, requires time. You will have to wait for another update to the Penguin algorithm or for the data to be refreshed by Google, a process that is not automated and is not carried out on a schedule. In June 2015, Gary Illyes of Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst team said that a refresh was "still some months away", but that the ultimate aim was to make Penguin and associated data update constantly. "Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates. The idea is to keep optimizing as we go now," said a Google spokesperson. This confirms that Google is now constantly striving to better identify websites that are engaged in artificial linking practices, and to punish them.

In September 2015, Google issued a warning to website owners that attract new penalties after successfully going through the consideration process - for example, a webmaster who removed an artificial link, submitted a reconsideration request and then after successfully being reconsidered, re-instated the artificial link. A Google spokesperson said that such "repeated violations may make a successful reconsideration process more difficult to achieve", which seems to seriously suggest that longer-term penalties will be applied to repeat-offenders.

After a wait of nearly two years, Google finally released a new update to it's Penguin algorithm in September 2016. This is the final update that will be released in this way, as the Panda algorithm has now been integrated into Google's core search algorithm and will therefore be processed in real-time. Any sites that had previously been penalized by Penguin will have had to wait until now to recover from these. Gary Illyes of Google told Search Engine Land that Penguin now "devalues or ignores spam links", as apposed to adjusting down a website's ranking.

September 2012 - October 2014: "Pirate" Updates

First released in September 2012, this update was designed to help Google take action against piracy on the internet by punishing websites that infringe on copyright or are the subject of filings with Google's DMCA process (more than 15 million URLs have been the subject of DMCA requests). Pirate Update 2 was released in October 2014 and has been extremely effective at targeting websites that, for example, host videos of copyrighted material such as films and TV shows, with some websites suffering a 98% drop in search visibility, according to SearchMetrics.

August 2013: "Hummingbird" Update

In around August 2013 Google released possibly the biggest update in it's history. Google named this update "Hummingbird" to reflect the fact that it would result in a quicker and more accurate calculation of what search results are best for any given search term. This update was designed to favor "conversational" search queries, in part to reflect the fact that many queries are now made verbally via smartphones, and resulted in less emphasis being placed specifically on keywords and more emphasis being placed on factors such as context, location and intent. As an example, the search term "where to buy pizza bases" might provide search results for grocery stores local to you (if your device is set to allow Google to know your location),where as a previous search might have concentrated only on the keyword "pizza" and offered websites that sell pizza.

June 2014: "Payday Loan" Update

In June 2014, Google announced a new update to it's algorithm, referred to as the "Payday Loan" update in the industry. Google's Matt Cutts said that this update impacted roughly only 0.3% of the U.S. queries and targeted websites connected to what they called "spammy queries" such as pay day loans, viagra, pornographic and other queries that suffer from a lot of spam search results. Several additional updates have since been released.

July 2014 - December 2014: "Pigeon" Updates

Around the end of July 2014, reports started circulating that Google had updated it's algorithm for search results with a localized element, which affects both regular search results and map search results (as of August 2014, this update is only affecting results in the English language and for results in the United States). This update primarily affects websites that want to rank highly for local searches, for example if someone is searching for "Italian food in London". As a result of this update, it seems that more importance has been placed on directory websites that list local businesses - in some cases, such as in the hotel industry, directory websites that list local businesses seem to be ranking higher than the actual local businesses that they list. But in other categories, such as pizza delivery, local businesses with high quality websites seem to be ranking higher than before.

Towards the end of 2014, Google confirmed that the "Pigeon" update had now rolled out to all English-speaking locales except India.

July 2014 - : "HTTPS" Update

In late July 2014 Google announced that it's algorithms would begin slightly favoring websites that are secured using HTTPS (HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security). Google's Gary Illyes described HTTPS as being like a "tie-breaker" - when two websites are virtually identical in all other ranking signals, the website that uses HTTPS will be ranked higher. Google also announced plans to ultimately strengthen the importance of HTTPS and that they would like to "encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web".

April 2015 - January 2017: "Mobile-Friendly" Update

In February 2015, Google announced that it would begin to consider whether a website was mobile friendly when returning search results on mobile devices, in a change that Google itself described as "significant". Starting from late April 2015, it is expected that only websites that are considered to be mobile-friendly by Google will be able to attain high rankings in results for searches performed on mobile devices, with searches performed on other devices unaffected. In June 2016 at Search Marketing Summit Sydney, Gary Illyes also confirmed that Google are planning to make page speed more important on searches performed on a mobile device, hinting that this would probably come into effect by the end of 2016. And in January 2017 Google announced a change that results in poorer rankings for web pages that obscure content using interstitials on mobile devices.

April 2015: "App-Indexing" Update

By April 2015, Google claims to have indexed 30 billion links within apps that have "App Indexing" enabled. If you use an android device you will already have noticed that links related to apps that you have installed were included in your search results, where relevant. Starting from April 16th 2015, App Indexing will start to be used as a ranking signal, with search results performed on android devices including relevant links related to any app, including those that have not been installed.

"If you've implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it," said a Google spokesperson. The stated aim of this change is to help app developers acquire new users and re-engage existing ones.

April 2015: "Doorway" Update

In March 2015, Google announced that it would begin to take more action against websites that contain "doorway" pages (pages that exist solely to rank in search engine results without any clear, unique value). "We have a long-standing view that doorway pages that are created solely for search engines can harm the quality of the user's search experience," said Google's spokesperson. They went on to say that this ranking adjustment could have a "broad impact" on any websites with a large number of doorway pages. Google confirmed in a Google+ Hangout in April 2015 that this algorithm change had been implemented.

May 2015: "Quality" Update

Following rumors that many websites had seen changes in their rankings early in May 2015, Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that it has changed it's core ranking algorithm in terms of how it processes quality signals - that is, how it determines the quality of a website. Some major websites, including HubPages have suffered a drop in rankings, but Google has emphasized that no particular type of website was targeted by the updated.

October 2015: "RankBrain" Update

In November 2014 we described how Google's search algorithms were adapting to accommodate an increasing trend towards queries that involve "natural language" instead of specific keywords (a practice called "Semantic Search"). Almost a year later, Google has confirmed to Bloomberg that it is now using an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed "RankBrain" to understand the 15% of queries that its systems have never seen before - queries that, for example, contain complex natural language questions such as "What's the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?"

Google has confirmed to SearchEngineLand that RankBrain began rolling out in early 2015, and that it has been having an effect on global search results for several months. Google also confirmed that RankBrain is not just involved in interpreting search queries, but that it also contributes to how highly pages rank for specific searches. Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google, described RankBrain to Bloomberg as now the "third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query", but for the moment the company are not disclosing the exact nature of this contribution.

January 2016: Core Algorithm Update

From early January 2016, changes to the way that Google ranks low-quality websites (previously known as "Panda" updates) became part of it's "core" algorithm, which can change often and in real-time. A large change in search engine rankings reported by many specialists in the same month was attributed by Google to lots of minor updates to their Core algorithm being released at the same time, since they prefer not to release them over the holiday period.

September 2016: "Possum" Update

In early September, Google released it's most comprehensive update to search results with a localized element since the "Pigeon" update in July 2014. This update has been called "Possum" by SEO professionals because of the way in which many business listings appear to have disappeared from localized search results, when in fact they are being hidden by filters.

Prior to this update, businesses that are located outside physical city limits often found it more difficult to rank for any keywords that included that city name, but now many have seen a significant increase in rankings. As a result, other businesses have seen their rankings drop. Another aim of this update seems to be an attempt to filter out more business listings that share the same address and category. For example, where multiple dentists share the same physical address, Google's localized search results will now show fewer of these in the same set of results.

There are also reports that this update has applied more importance on the searcher's actual location when it comes to the results returned. For example, people searching for "pizza in London" who are physically located in London will see different results to those who perform the search from New York. However, this and other aspects of the change still seem to be subject to fluctuation, as if Google has not yet finalized this update.

February 2017: Groundhog

It is believed that this update was released to specifically target a widely-used linking scheme in private blog networks. Such networks are usually all owned by the same entity and are designed to increase the rankings of member websites.

March 2017: Fred

An update to Google's algorithms took place in early March 2017 but was not confirmed by Google until March 23rd. This update was given it's name after a Google official joked about how all updates should be called "Fred". According to reports from SearchEngineLand, most websites that suffered lower rankings after this update were engaged in so-called "black-hat" methods and primarily contained content that was spammy, irrelevant, duplicate, low quality or outdated. According to Site Pro News, websites affected by this update suffered a 50%-90% decrease in traffic from Google's search results.

December 2017

Google has confirmed that several "minor improvements" to their algorithms were released between 13th and 18th December 2017. Reports suggest that these changes mainly affected websites that use multiple keyword permutations and doorway pages for content that is largely the same. Google's spokesperson added that these updates were part of "regular and routine efforts to improve relevancy".

March 2018: Quality Update

Google confirmed on March 7th that a major update to their core algorithm had been released, and changes related to this change were experienced by website owners throughout March. This update reduced the ranking of websites that are deemed to be low quality, including websites that have multiple errors, feature aggressive advertising or consist largely of poorly-written or irrelevant content.

According to Google's John Mueller, Google crawls poor-quality websites much less frequently than other websites, so it can take many months for Google to acknowledge quality improvements in a website. He also recommends that website owners strive to improve the quality of existing poor-quality content rather than remove it, since "there is always the possibility that some of the removed content was actually adding value to the site".

July 2018: Mobile Speed Update

In January 2018 Google announced that from July 2018 page speed will become a consideration when Google ranks pages for any given search term on mobile devices. According to Google's announcement, the new ranking signal "will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries".

August 2018: "Medic" Update

Between 1st August and 8th August, Google rolled out a major update to their core ranking algorithm. This update mainly affected so-called "your money or your life" websites (those that can have an impact on your financial or physical well-being),such as financial and medical websites. Google has been quick to point out that websites which have suffered a drop in rankings have not been penalized, only that other websites are now ranked more highly. These will tend to be websites that are deemed to have more expertise, authority and trust, which can be enhanced by making sure that websites pass Google's quality tests.

October 2018: Image Search Update

In October 2018 Google announced that over the last year it has been modifying it's image ranking algorithm to give more importance to the page images belong to, rather than just the image itself. This means that, for example, a search for pictures of dogs is now more likely to return images from dog-related websites than before. This change also means that images which are incongruous to the overall content of a web page will now perform less well in searches.

January 2019: "Newsgate" Update

In the first few weeks of 2019 Google released an algorithm update targeting websites that publish content to Google News, which primarily includes news and niche blog websites. The update resulted in poorer search rankings for websites that publish content that is largely copied or reworded without the addition of added value, as well as websites that are not transparent about the source or author of news stories. And as if to confirm the update, several days later Google released tips to enable publishers to succeed in publishing to Google News, including the recommendation that any content that is copied or largely reworded be blocked from publishing to Google News.

June 2019: Core Algorithm Update

Google has confirmed that an update to their core algorithms took place in early June. In a Webmaster Hangout Google's John Mueller said that the update did not target anything specific and that "sometimes the web just evolved, sometimes what users expect evolves, and similarly sometimes our algorithms evolve as well". However, he did emphasize the importance Google attaches to website quality and authority in it's rankings, and referenced an earlier blog post that website owners can use to guage the quality if their websites.

October 2019: "BERT" Update

In late October Google announced a major algorithm change which represents a "significant improvement" to how Google understands queries that contain natural language. Google went as far to call this update "the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search".

In 2018 Google introduced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing pre-training called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or "BERT" for short and has now started applying this to it's search results. This change means that Google's algorithm now considers the full context of a word by looking at the words either side of it, which is particularly useful for understanding the intent behind a search (such as when "for" and "to" are particularly meaningful).

Google estimates that up to 10% of English-language queries in the United States will be affected by this update, with more languages and territories being included in due course. Because this is an update to how Google interprets search queries, and not how it evaluates website content, website owners cannot optimize their web pages to be more highly ranked by this element of Google's algorithm.

November 2019: Local Search Update

Google confirmed in November that it began applying neural matching to all local search results worldwide, meaning that when you perform a search with a localised element the results could include business listings that do not have your search terms in their business names or descriptions, and are instead conceptually related to your search.

January 2020: Core Algorithm Update

In mid January 2020 Google's Danny Sullivan announced that Google had started to roll out a core algorithm update. This update was not designed to target anything specific, or penalize any specific approach to SEO - if your website's rankings drop after this update, it's likely that other websites are simply publishing content which is of a better quality and is more relevant.

May 2020: Core Algorithm Update

For the second time in 2020, Google's Danny Sullivan announced that Google had released a core algorithm update and that official guidance relating to the update would be the same as for previous core algorithm updates.

June 2020: "Relevance" Algorithm Update

For about a week after 18th June 2020, search engine rankings for many websites fluctuated, with different categories of website experiencing different effects. According to Sam Underwood's analysis, law and government websites experienced an increase in visibility of more than 7%, with news and media websites experiencing almost the opposite. Further analysis seems to show that Google has introduced a preference for websites that are specialists for a topic area, rather than websites that may cover many different topics (which may be a response to the Coronavirus pandemic).

April 2021: "Product Reviews" Update

On April 8, 2021 Google announced a new algorithm update that was designed to favour review websites that consist of more in-depth content than those with thinner content. As a result, some websites experienced significant increases and decreases in search engine rankings, with those featuring more thorough, detailed and balanced reviews enjoying the most favourable effects.

June & July 2021: Core Algorithm Update

Google announced that part of a core update started on June 2nd (probably lasting 1 or 2 weeks) and will finish rolling out in July. As with any core update, these updates are not designed to specifically punish any websites or optimization strategies, but are instead designed to improve Google's ranking methods. It is therefore likely that only marginal differences in ranking, if any, might be observed for any specific website.

July 2021: Link Spam Update

In late July Google started rolling out an update to it's algorithms to even more effectively identify "unnatural" links and potentially penalize offending websites. Since links form an important way in which Google ranks websites in search results, it is constantly seeking ways to differentiate so-called "natural" links from links that are created specifically to gain an unfair advantage. If you must use such links on your website (such as for monetization),Google recommends using special link attributes to openly identify them as such.

December 2021: "Vicinity" Update

From early to mid December Google rolled out their largest update to localised search results in 5 years. In recent years, many businesses have been able to rank highly in localised search results even if they are located some distance from the location in question but this appears to have now changed, with much more emphasis being placed on proximity of the business. Map results are also now more magnified to a smaller area and are displaying a wider variety of businesses. Some businesses that have dominated localised search results for some years have now disappeared from many map results and other businesses (many of them smaller or with less optimised websites) have seen their websites rank more highly.

August 2022: "Helpful Content" Update

If you have ever clicked on a search result that looks promising only to be left frustrated by the content you find this update is for you. Google wants to ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people. This update aims to better discern between content that is designed to rank highly in search engines and content that is written specifically to be helpful to it's target audience.

December 2022: Link Spam Update

In the first update to it's Link Spam algorithm since July 2021, Google now uses SpamBrain AI to "detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links", rather than just detecting spam directly. The update began to roll out on December 14th and was expected to take several weeks to complete. If your site is involved in any of the spammy techniques identified, it is likely that any links involved will lose any benefit and you may see a drop in search engine rankings.

Conclusion

From early to mid December Google rolled out their largest update to localised search results in 5 years. In recent years, many businesses have been able to rank highly in localised search results even if they are located some distance from the location in question, but this appears to have now changed - with much more emphasis being placed on proximity of the business. Map results are also now more magnified to a smaller area and are displaying a wider variety of businesses. Some businesses that have dominated localised search results for some years have now disappeared from many map results and other businesses (many of them smaller or with less optimised websites) have seen their websites rank more highly.

Last updated: 19th December, 2022